Harbinger
by Peptuck
Summary: A rampage by an insane psychic on an Alliance colony draws the attention of Commander Shepard, Citadel Spectre and former FEAR point man. Events are set in motion that may mean the death of a galaxy, or salvation from the Reapers. ME/FEAR fusion.
1. Prologue: Synchronization

_**Harbinger**_

_**Prologue: Synchronization**_

* * *

><p><em>"No. No, you little shit. You sit in that fucking chair and listen to me, you pencil-dicked mouth-breathing pen-pushing pile of fuck. I make an order of magnitude more in one month than you make all year because I know what the fuck I'm talking about. I supplied every part of Origin. I put together Harbinger. I designed every phase of Perseus. None of this would exist without me. So before you try to throw me under the goddamn bus, <em>shut up_ and listen._

_"You collection of slack-jawed, drooling corporate dickballs decided he should be shipped off to some ass-end research colony in the first place. Now you're going to blame _me _for losing him? You assholes were the ones to throw that investment to the wind. You knew Mindoir was in the Verge. You knew that there were batarians out there. And I told you goddamn morons that _she's still aware_!"_

_-Harlan Wade, Head of Research, Project Perseus, Armacham Internal Meeting 4/18/2170_

* * *

><p><em><strong>412/2170 - Mindoir - Primary Colony Site**_

Smoke and dust choked his lungs. Tons of ceramic material poured down around him, crashing to the hardened asphalt surrounding the residential section. He could hear screams and distant gunfire, the searing of human flesh by intense heat, and alien tongues shouting over the chaos. Thrumming ship engines passed by overhead.

Something crashed into his back, and the wind was blasted out of his lungs. He toppled sideways, and a cry of agony came from somewhere nearby. Maybe it was him, he couldn't tell. Animal terror sent his heart into a machinegun staccato. Rolling over the hard asphalt, he could smell the acrid stench of incendiary weapons and the more pungent and gagging aroma of burnt human flesh.

Bodies lay sprawled around the residential area. Some were perforated by dozens of rounds, their flesh and organs pulped. Others were decomposing into puddles of gleaming fluid as corrosive toxins ate through their bodies. More were charred beyond recognition. Many had the remains of weapons lying next to them, mute testimony to their efforts to protect their homes and families.

The batarians didn't care. Anyone who resisted was killed. Like his mother, gunned down and burned to an unrecognizable husk. Like his father, blown up along with four other colonists when a gunship strafed the colony's perimeter.

He struggled to his feet, gasping, heart thundering in his ears and terror running through his veins. He looked around the street, eyes and head swiveling and searching for any shelter. He saw nothing but fire, black smoke, debris, and the bodies of those who'd resisted. Screams sounded in the distance, but these weren't ones of fear - they were of pain and despair. Prisoners being dragged off by the batarians.

_I need a weapon. _Thought and instinct agreed, but the weapons dropped by the nearest dead were damaged or confiscated by batarian sweep-teams. He had to find one that worked.

He shook his head as he stumbled across the street toward a building that wasn't ablaze. The batarians had been going room to room, sweeping for survivors and burning any buildings where people were shooting. The pre-fabs weren't designed to survive plasma flamethrowers. He was lucky he'd been missed by the sweep-teams.

A woman wailed somewhere nearby, and he paused.

"No! Give them back!" she screamed, and then there was a sudden gunshot.

He didn't need to see it to know what had just happened, but he felt a silent numbness at the unseen atrocity. He reached for the door to the intact house, and it slid open with a cheery chime. He stumbled through the door, falling to his knees, and looked around the sparsely furnished pre-fab. A couple of bodies were crumpled in the house: a colonist riddled with bullet wounds, and a batarian in blue and red armor. A rifle was clenched in the colonist's hands.

At least he took the bastard with him.

The teenager rose and limped across the room to the fallen colonist, and pried the man's assault rifle from limp fingers. He raised it to his shoulder like his father had taught him, checking the sights, the charge, ammo capacity, and thermal sink. It was an old Mattock semi-auto, firing larger-than-average slugs at the expense of greater heat generation. It was a cheap and simple weapon that wouldn't sell for much, which was likely why the sweep-teams hadn't bothered looting it.

The weight took some of the terror off. It was familiar. Comforting. Powerful. He turned back toward the door, his fear still beating against his skull but becoming more muted. More controlled. He was likely going to die, but he wouldn't die easy.

He heard voices outside, the harsh, echoing snarls of batarians. They spoke quick, terse words; if he had a translator on him he would know what they were saying, but instinct told him they were likely on a final sweep for survivors.

They would have sensors in their suits. Those sensors would ID a human thermal signature in the structure. They would come for him.

The screaming woman's voice came back to him suddenly, reverberating in his mind, and numbness suddenly became something else. Something hot and savage and pure, in its brutal simplicity. It wasn't rage, or hate, or violent, berserk fury, but something else. Something more powerful than those simple emotions.

And a distant, wary part of his mind realized that it _was not his_. Instinct told him that there was someone else present, who he couldn't see or touch or hear, and the sensations sweeping over him were this other's. It was there, in the room, watching him, touching his thoughts.

The rest of him did not care. A blue-hot wave of violence poured through him, and he felt heat and shards of agony ripping up through his chest. The other was digging through him, pain rolling around in his head, buzzing sensations flickering underneath the bone of his skull. He dropped to one knee, gasping in agony, and then the pain and fire and purity ripped out through his throat. The walls shuddered faintly as he screamed, a savage cry so pure and loud that he felt blood in his mouth.

It all crashed together: noise and fire and emotion and the other somewhere in his mind and this room and his body, colliding and fusing and burning together into one single glittering thought:

_**They all deserve to die.**_

He surged to his feet, shouldering the Mattock rifle, and the door flew open.

* * *

><p>Six batarian slavers were striding through the street outside. They were trained soldiers and experienced veterans who had put down slave rebellions and raided colonies of many species for decades. They were no ordinary slavers, for the Batarian Hegemony had supplied military expertise to the pirates operating in the Skyllian Verge and Attican Traverse in order to ensure that the criminals inflicted maximum damage with plausible deniability.<p>

All six had spotted the live human inside the structure and were approaching with stunners ready to subdue the pathetic, cowering creature. They were joking among themselves, tallying their kills and captures. They anticipated adding another to the tally; they were being paid by the head, and while live slaves were preferable the mission was intended to destroy the colony outright and leave no survivors. The humans had to be taught a lesson.

That was before a scream unlike anything they'd ever heard ripped out of the building. They froze, uncertain for a moment, before unanimously dropping their stunners and shouldering their assault weapons. The squad leader, an officer named Charn, ordered them into cover, and they went for the nearest chunks of bullet-resistant debris and disabled vehicles. The six soldiers set up a semicircle of assault rifles, shotguns, and a squad support machinegun leveled at the door in a matter of seconds, in complete silence.

The door opened, and they opened fire a second later. Sheets of hypervelocity slugs ripped across the ten meters between the squad and the doorframe, a barrage that would have shattered the shields of anything short of a heavy power-armor mech.

In the second between the door opening and the soldiers opening fire, a blur shot out and rushed to the side, ducking under their line of fire and charging outside the cone of converging bullets that rained upon the doorway. Three rapid cracks erupted, so close together they sounded like a single gunshot. The rightmost batarian crumpled sideways, blood exploding from his helmet.

The closest batarian saw what had happened to his companion and started to turn toward the figure. Three more rounds from the Mattock rifle slammed into his shields, the first two battering it down and the third punching through his throat.

A third went down as he started to yell a warning, which was cut off by four shots from the Mattock. By that time the other three had spotted the blurring figure that had cut their squad in half and shifted aim right as it ran behind an overturned rover. Bullets slammed into the metal as they poured suppressive fire on the target, and Charn ordered his remaining troops to fan out and ready grenades. He had no idea what the hell he was facing - some kind of augmented human supersoldier? But what would such a thing be doing out here on the fringes of human space?

Whatever it was, he intended to kill it.

They fired staggered bursts as they spread out, hitting both sides of the rover to keep the human from moving. Charn drew and primed a grenade as they kept the target suppressed. All he had to do was get the angle right to loop it over the crashed vehicle and-

The batarian firing on the right side of the rover squeezed off a burst, then paused to let the heat of his weapon dissipate before firing a second. In the heartbeat between shot, there was a flicker of blurry motion, a single long crack, and that soldier tumbled to the road.

Charn cursed, chucking his grenade at that side of the rover, and started to raise his rifle. The human's weapon roared again, and he saw the batarian behind him topple on his helmet's HUD. The batarian officer's weapon rose to sight the freakishly-fast human, but he was already running for a chunk of debris five meters away.

"Dammit!" the batarian hissed as the human reached cover. He wasn't going to stick around the fight this thing; he was smart enough to know when he was in over his head.

"This is Charn!" he shouted into his radio as he started to back away, keeping his weapon leveled at the human's hiding place. "We've run into some kind of augmented human! Need backup, now!"

He saw movement from the debris, and the instant his brain registered the human's presence he pulled the trigger. The rifle roared.

_I hit him! _The batarian officer thought with a thrill. His sights were dead center on the-

Movement to his right. He twitched his weapon toward it, and saw the human charging straight toward him. A pair of rounds impacted his shield, but his armor had improved capacitors compared with his subordinates, and the barriers held. But how the hell-

He sighted and fired again. The burst of hypervelocity rounds impacted dead-center - or would have, but the human was gone again. More shots impacted his shields, and one clipped off his torso armor, barely deflected by the heavy plating.

Fear was something Charn was familiar with, but the sudden helpless terror he felt as he swung the rifle, trying to track this impossibly fast human was something totally new, and-

The human was right in front of him, vapor was bursting from the overheated rifle in its hands. The alien was too close to dodge, however, and Charn sprayed his rifle at full auto. At this close range, he couldn't miss!

The human went down, and for an instant Charn thought he'd finally killed the freakish thing. Then the human slid into his legs, boots extended, moving at near-impossible speed into a sliding kick.

He hit Charn in the ankles, throwing the batarian officer forward and sideways into a tumble. He hit the ashpalt and rolled, bringing up his weapon, but the human sprang to his feet, whirled, and leapt up into a spinning kick. His leg blurred up into Charn's faceplate, and he felt a sudden, horrible _crack-_

* * *

><p>The <em>SSV Einstein <em>and its battle group had responded to the attack within hours. A fleet of cruisers, frigates, and the massive carrier arrived in the skies over Mindoir, and the response from the batarian slaver force was an immediate and total retreat. Their ships scattered after only a brief exchange of light mass accelerator fire, and Alliance Marine relief forces were en route to the besieged colony in minutes.

Smoke and fire rose from the remains of the main colony, but as Lieutenant Ernesto Zabaleta looked over the sensor feed, he was startled at the number of life signs in the colony. He had gone in with the grim expectation that many of the colonists would have already been loaded onto the slavers' ships by the time they'd arrived, but more than two-thirds of the population were still down there, though most of them were gathered together into large, tightly-packed groups. Spectral analysis indicated they had been herded into pens for processing and loading, but for some reason the batarians hadn't put them on the ships.

But even more confusing, however, was that there were no batarian life signs at all. Scans were picking up what looked like a lot of bodies, but no batarians were inside the colony.

The dropships and armored vehicles landed and Marines stormed out, moving through the colony. Zabaleta led a platoon toward one of the concentrations of civilians, and as he entered the small square where they were gathered he nearly retched inside his helmet. Hundreds of civilians - men, women, and children - were gathered in large ceramic and metal cages. They were chained, collared, and beaten, with many of them limp and unconscious on the floors of the cages. He saw some with what looked like wires stapled to the backs of their necks.

"Get medical and support units down here now!" Zabaleta ordered. "Get those people out of there! Jesus, get them out now!"

As medical units arrived and the captives were pulled out of the cages and freed, Zabaleta led more sweep teams through the colony. Everywhere within the pre-fabricated city, however, he saw corpses. Many human, but many, many more batarian. He stopped counting at two hundred dead slavers.

What the hell had happened here?

Zabaleta's radio crackled as he swept through a burnt-out residence with a fire team.

"Hammer Actual, this is Two-One," reported one of his squad commanders. "I think you need to see this."

Zabaleta acknowledged, checked Two-One's location on his omnitool (half a kilometer to the east on the other side of the colony) and set out with his fire team. Ten minutes of picking through the blasted pre-fab urban landscape, he stepped out into an open landing pad that the batarians had apparently been using when the fleet arrived. He walked out into the open, and stared in awe.

More than a hundred batarian bodies littered the pad. The alien soldiers had been beaten, shot, stabbed, and set ablaze. They lay in twisted heaps, many with entry wounds in their backs. Blood pooled on the pad, ankle deep in some places. A batarian dropship sat in the middle of the pad, its engines twisted and burned. It was obvious that the batarians had been massacred while fleeing, but the corpses had been dead for at least an hour. They hadn't been running because the fleet had arrived; they'd been trying to reach the damaged dropship.

Zabaleta looked across the pad, and saw First Squad, Second Platoon standing around a pile of cargo containers. In the middle of the group of Marines was a single slight figure, sitting on a box and staring at the dead bodies.

He approached the squad, and got a better look at the sitting person. He was a young human man, maybe in his mid teens. His clothes - typical rugged civilian clothing for colony work - was covered in batarian and human blood. Rough bandages were wrapped around wounds in his arms, legs, and torso. His face was just showing the beginnings of facial hair, and he had dark blue eyes that stared at the pile of dead bodies. An old Mattock rifle sat next to him, along with a shotgun and a pistol, all covered in blood splatter.

Zabaleta stared at the lone human boy, and a shiver ran up his spine as he approached. His helmet scanners picked up the boy's personal ID: "A. Shepard."

"Jesus, son," the lieutenant whispered as he approached the battered teenager. "Are you okay?"

They teenager nodded silently, still staring at the corpses.

"What the hell happened here?" the lieutenant asked, and the boy finally looked up. There was something in those blue eyes, something distant and disturbing.

"They deserved to die," Shepard murmured, his voice flat.

A silent, chill wind blew through the colony, and Zabaleta convinced himself that was why he was shaking.

"They _all _deserved to die."

* * *

><p><strong><em>Author's Notes:<em> **The notion behind this fusion crossover was rolling around in my head for a while, much like Renegade. I decided to give it a whirl, and while I've got a vague outline planned out, the fun is always in the details.

As a fusion fic, expect a lot of elements from FEAR to make their way into this storyline. We're also going to be diverging wildly from ME canon for this story.

Until next chapter . . . .


	2. Interval 1:  Chapter 1

_**Interval One: Revolution**_

_**Chapter One: Contact**_

"_We're not going after him at this point for three reasons. First, because going after him while he's in Alliance custody is suicide. Second, because we can observe him while he's in Alliance custody and while he's undergoing Alliance military training, and see how he develops. We just need to slip a few chits into the right palms so that they understand just what he is and how valuable he is to everyone. Third, because while Mindoir was happening, we had that incident on the Pragia facility and we've got our hands full just cleaning that mess up. Krieg's people are stretched thin on the ground. There's no point behind launching another risky covert operation to recover an asset. This one's safer and more valuable developing on his own anyway." _

_-Henry Lawson, Closed Armacham Planning Session, 7/30/2170_

* * *

><p><strong><em>Date: Unknown - Location: Unknown<em>**

_The grass was a pale shade of green, but it grew tall and thick, rising up to his waist. He stood among it, the blades tickling his bare arms. Sunlight streamed down from above, warm and inviting, but when he looked up he saw a faint discoloration in the blue sky overhead. Flickers of purple and red shot through it here and there. _

_It wasn't real. It was the inner surface of a habitation dome, projecting a false sky for the people living inside._

_He turned slowly, peering around the unfamiliar landscape, and his eyes fell on a hill ahead of him. A single large tree rose over the hill, and from one of the thick boughs hung a small wooden swing._

_The wind blew past him, carrying a scent of fresh grass, and he thought he heard a child humming in the distance. He started up the hill, and with each step the humming grew more distinct. He realized halfway up that it was a young girl's voice, and as he crested the hill he started looking around for her. She wasn't anywhere around the tree, or anywhere else on top of the hill, which confused him until he heard a sudden giggle._

_He looked up, and found her sitting on the tree branch above him, staring out toward the false sky. She had pale skin, pitch-black hair, and a dress the color of blood. He opened his mouth to speak to the girl, but before he could say anything her head snapped down toward him._

_Glowing golden irises peered down at him._

_The ground began to shudder, and the sky's color shifted to a darker shade, purple and red running together. The air itself shivered, like water droplets sending ripples through a pool. The ground cracked open with a shaking impact, and the hill began to split apart. The violent shaking threw him to his knees, and he felt heat sweep out around him. There was a pounding like thunder overhead._

_The crack in the ground widened and spread, and he saw a long, segmented appendage emerge, gleaming with alien metals, and a horrific synthetic roar sounded from below. He clamped his hands over his ears, screaming, and-_

* * *

><p><strong><em>821/2183 - SSV Normandy _**

Adam Shepard's eyes jerked open.

The console beside his bed bunk buzzed again, insistently. He stared at the blinking light indicating that the pilot, likely Joker, was calling him. He kept his gaze locked on it as his heart slowed from the rapid-fire pounding, and his breathing steadied.

Another nightmare. He'd been battling them for years now, but they'd become much more intense over the last few months. He could thank the Protheans for a lot of that, and the Cipher hadn't made it any easier - just more understandable. Sovereign had rounded it all out.

But the child . . . He hadn't seen her before. What the hell was that all about? Just a unique flavor to this particular nightmare?

The console was still buzzing, and he heard a quiet groan behind him.

"Answer it and see what he wants," Ashley muttered, rolling over to press her face into her pillow. A couple of second passed before she let out a muffled "Sir."

Shepard half-grunted, half-chuckled as he reached over to key the console.

"Shepard," he muttered.

"Hey, Commander!" Joker called, sounding cheerful enough to get shot repeatedly in the face. Shepard knew the only reason he could be in such a good mood was because he had the opportunity to wake up his CO for bad news. "We just got a call from the Fifth Fleet. Guess who needs us again?"

"Admiral Hackett, obv-" Shepard started.

Something moved across the room.

He had the pistol hidden under his pillow out, unfolded, and sighted on pure reflex. His finger twitched on the trigger before Shepard stopped himself.

He stared at the wall across his bunk, blinking, but there was nothing there. He slowly lowered the pistol, and realized Joker was still talking.

"-llo? Com-man-der? You still there?"

"Yeah," Shepard said, shaking his head. "Sorry, distracted."

"Uh-huh," Joker replied. "Repeating for the deaf and dumb, Admiral Hackett wants to talk to you, high-priority. Secret stuff, ultra-high-clearance, Spectre required, blah-blah-blah. You know the drill."

"Patch it through to the comms room," Shepard ordered, folding up the pistol and sliding it back under the pillow. The wonders of cosmic-horror-induced paranoia. "I'll be up there in a few minutes."

"Got it." The channel closed, and Shepard lay back in the bed for a few seconds.

Ashley propped herself up on her elbows beside him, peering down into his face. In the dim light of his bunk, he could barely see her eyes. She looked him over for a moment, and a concerned frown creased her features.

"More bad dreams?" she asked, and he exhaled. She nodded at the unspoken affirmation. They'd talked about it off and on over the last few months, so he didn't need to tell her the details. Fire, destruction, evil Lovecraftian machines from beyond the stars - it was getting routine by now.

"Admiral's got a job for us," he said, and her frown shifted to a smirk.

"The Admiral always has a job for us," she retorted. "Maybe this time it'll be something interesting."

"Hostage rescue from a flaming volcano while angry elcor mercenaries pummel us with heavy artillery?" Shepard mused, and she scoffed.

"We'll need at least a cruiser bombing us from orbit before it actually gets interesting," she said. He chuckled again, and reached up to brush her face with his fingers. She closed her eyes and leaned her head a bit into the touch. The circumstances of their . . . liaison, really, were complicated, and relationships built on the heat of the moment were notoriously unstable. Plus they'd gotten together while fighting to save a galaxy, which put a whole new meaning on releasing stress.

Yet here they still were. Shepard wondered if he really deserved her, all things considered. Most women, once they got to know him - and once they saw him in action - became very wary at best. But Ash had never reacted like that. And in quiet moments like this, when he looked into Ash's eyes or held her hand, or simply lay beside her and could feel her warmth through his skin, the quiet voice of despair faded.

She brought him peace. Ironic, considering their professions.

He started to sit up, gently drawing his hand from her face.

"Get the rest of the team ready," he said as she rolled away from him. He clambered up out of the bed and started for his clothes locker.

"On it," she said, clambering up out of the sheets and picking up the parts of her uniform that littered the floor. He stopped to watch her do so, and she flashed him a smile as she started getting dressed.

"The Admiral is waiting, _sir_," Ashley said. She made the honorific sound like a joke, and it was. After all, they'd already made a mockery of fraternization regs. She could call him whatever she wanted to.

"He can hold for a minute," Shepard said, and Ashley laughed.

* * *

><p>Shepard had his uniform on within a few minutes. He grabbed a thermos of blessed black coffee from the mess' dispenser and headed up to the crew deck. Shepard nodded to the few crewmen and officers on duty as he passed and ducked into the comms room while sipping the holy black ambrosia in his thermos. One of the advantages of being a Spectre with hundreds of millions of untraceable credits spread across multiple banking institutions was that one could rip out the standard issue food processors and replace them with the higher-end equipment that was common on pleasure yachts. They'd made a <em>killing<em> off moving all the arms and armor they'd pulled from the countless dead mercenaries and geth left in their wake.

"Joker, put the Admiral on," Shepard said as the comms room door slid shut. The anti-intrusion systems fired up with a barely audible hum, and a couple of seconds later the two-dimensional screen on the far end of the circular room lit up.

Admiral Stephen Hackett was a man whose face looked like the dark side of Luna. Pocked and scarred, the grizzled old Admiral had earned the respect of every man and woman in his fleet countless times over. If Captain Anderson could build a life-sized statue out of his medals, then Admiral Hackett could build a small fortress from them.

"Commander, we've got a situation," Hackett started, with his usual lack of anything resembling formality. Like Shepard, Hackett subscribed to the mentality that small talk was wasted time.

"There's always a situation, Admiral," Shepard replied, but Hackett's face was grim. He wasn't in a laughing mood.

"There's been an attack on our colony on Naxos in the Minotaur System in Argos Rho," Hackett continued. He glanced at something off-screen. "We need you to investigate."

As always, Hackett let Shepard put the pieces together.

"If there's been an attack, why isn't the Alliance responding with a fleet?" Shepard asked immediately.

"We intend to, soon," Hackett replied, and then paused. His next words were very clear and direct. "Commander, we're waiting on a FEAR team to arrive before responding."

Shepard's blood ran cold. A First Encounter Assault Recon team would only be called in the event of a major paranormal threat. That also explained why Hackett wanted Shepard to assist, as his particular talents had landed him in FEAR units for more than a decade.

"What happened down there?" Shepard asked.

"Replica uprising, at an Armacham Technology base," Hackett said, and Shepard blinked. From what he knew about the clone soldier program . . . .

"That shouldn't be possible," he said. "Replica can't think for themselves."

"Technically, no," Hackett said with a shrug. "They're functionally retarded. They can operate as squads and platoons, have some technical knowledge of weapons and armor, and have excellent combat training, but they can't operate on their own and don't have the ability to make complex decisions on their own. They need a commander to give them orders."

"Who could take control of a Replica force?" Shepard asked. "There's supposed to be safeguards against voice command tampering."

"They're not voice-controlled," Hackett replied. "ATC built the colony a decade ago to house a military training and research facility for producing a version of Replica clones that could be controlled by a psychic commander. No more worries about preprogramming them to obey voice commands or someone tampering with voice controls if they're in constant contact with a psychic officer."

"Who's the commander?"

Hackett tapped a couple of keys on his end, and a couple of images popped up. A black-haired man with pale blue eyes appeared, wearing a red and black jacket. He wore light armor plating beneath the jacket. He was pale and thin, with short hair and a sharp, pointed nose. A quartet of figures in bulky gray-and-green armor and matching breather helmets loomed around him with assault rifles in hand, as he strode through a pre-fab module laboratory, a pair of white-coated corpses visible in the background. Blood splattered the front of his clothes and his mouth, and the corpses were covered in ragged wounds that resembled a varren mauling.

"This man is named Paxton Fettel," Hackett said. "I don't have the details on his background, but he's a strong psychic that Armacham has been conditioning to control the Replica. We don't know why he's gone nuts, but he's seized control and has been butchering the ATC staff on the colony."

"Looks like he's done more than butchering," Shepard said with a grimace.

"Like I said, he's gone nuts," Hackett repeated. "The colony's gone dark, so we don't know if he's doing the same to the civilian populace in the surrounding settlements, nor do we know if he's trying to get offworld, but we need to find out. Your experience and the _Normandy_ are our best bets at that."

Shepard brought up the relevant data on his display, pulling up star charts and planetary data. Hackett waited as he did this.

"What more can you tell me about this colony?" he asked.

"ATC established it a decade ago, like I said," Hackett replied. "Populace reached about forty thousand total, not counting the Replica they were growing. ATC has, or had, a large garrison of security mercs there, maybe a thousand troops, support personnel, and a few thousand regular employees."

"How many Replica? Are there any more psychic commanders?"

"Two battalions," Hackett said, and Shepard blinked again.

'That would be-"

"Three thousand Replica troops, yes," Hackett said. "One battalion for each generation they made to work with psychics." The admiral shrugged. "Bright side at least is that Fettel was the only commander in the program on Naxos. If we can take him out we can shut down the entire Replica force cold. They switch off if they don't have a psychic signal to control them. Safeguard, supposedly."

Shepard pored over the data for a moment, adding things up, and then he looked back up at the Admiral.

"How legal is this operation?" he asked. Hackett went silent for a moment, but his next words were very clear and flat. Official-sounding.

"The Alliance contracted Armacham to develop a more efficient means of controlling Replica units in combat under the legal restrictions imposed by the Council under the Genetic Construct Warfare Act. If Armacham Technology Corporation chose to step outside the boundaries of that law in the process of that contract, that is their business, and if the methods they are using sit outside the bounds of said contract, it will render the entire agreement null and void. Unfortunately, all legal repercussions would fall on ATC for violating the contract, per interstellar liability laws."

"Why would ATC greenlight a military contract plan that's illegal?" he asked.

"Scuttlebutt on the Citadel is that ATC's pushing to get the GCWA rewritten to allow for psychic controls," Hackett said. "But I don't know the details. Regardless, as of right now, its legality is dubious at best, and the Alliance doesn't condone it. Officially."

"So the Alliance can wipe their hands of it if it gets out?" Shepard asked, and Hackett nodded.

"Frankly, I'm not worried about the legal repercussions," Hackett growled. "If Fettel has gone nuts, forty thousand colonists could be in danger, let lone the damage he might inflict if he gets off Naxos. We're not letting that happen."

"Agreed," Shepard said. "I'll have my helmsman lay in a course right away. We shouldn't take more than a few hours to get there."

"Thank you, Shepard," Hackett said. "I appreciate you taking this risk for us."

"I'm not doing it for the Alliance, Admiral," Shepard said, and Hackett slowly nodded.

"And that's why you were made a Spectre, Commander. Good luck. Fifth Fleet out."

* * *

><p>"So, three thousand heavily-armed cloned super soldiers, forty thousand innocent civilians, and an insane human psychic," Garrus Vakarian said. His mandibles clicked against his jawline. "Sounds like a vacation."<p>

Shepard's team sat around the comms room, assembling after he'd finished his briefing from Hackett. The room was a lot emptier now than it had been months ago while hunting Saren. Kaidan Alenko had died on Virmire, Tali'Zorah Nar Rayya had returned home on her Pilgrimage, and Urdnot Wrex had departed for his homeworld.

They'd gone over the details of the operation, including the data Hackett had forwarded on the planet, the colony, and the ATC facility where the Replica had been housed before the uprising. Now it was time for planning and questions.

"Friendlier than Noveria or Illos," Ashley said from across the room as Shepard finished.

"How formidable is this Fettel, Commander?" Liara T'soni asked.

"Strong psychic, judging by the data the Admiral gave me," Shepard said. "But controlling the Replica takes a lot of his juice, so to speak. He won't be able to use most of his powers while commanding them. But he's got the usual we're familiar with. Telekinesis, pyrokenisis, telepathy, barrier generation. Some indications he can rend."

Ashley grimaced at that. The last thing any of them wanted was to go up against a psychic who could rip apart organic or inorganic objects by thinking hard at them.

"We treat him like we treat any biotic or other psychic," Shepard continued. "Shoot him first, preferably before he can see us."

"Easier said than done," Garrus said. "Blackwatch killteams prefer to bomb the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."

"I hope we don't have to resort to that," Shepard said, but he suspected they might. FEAR had dealt with dangerous psychics by using that exact same method, but only in extreme circumstances.

"There any way we can track this Fettel guy?" Ashley asked, leaning forward. "Otherwise we might have to hit him from orbit like Garrus said. Finding one man in three thousand is a pain in the ass even when they're not shooting back."

"ATC did plant a transmitter in Fettel's head," Shepard said with a nod. "And a second next to his heart."

"Did they put a bomb with it?' Garrus asked. "Simplest way. I've heard that's how Blackwatch deals with unstables. One press of a button and the problem is solved. Messy, though."

"No bomb," Shepard said. "Apparently ATC was more worried about losing track of their investment due to kidnapping or disaster than blowing it up."

"Too bad, that would have saved us time," Ashley added. "Still, three thousand is a bit steeper than the odds we normally deal with. Even with Saren's geth we were only fighting a few hundred at once."

"This is the part," Liara said, "Where Shepard tells us that we go down in the Mako with guns blazing and eventually determine our course of action once we are halfway in the middle of the mess."

Shepard scratched the back of his head.

"Plan A, yeah," he said, then shrugged. "We don't have enough intel yet on enemy forces and activities to come up with a plan, but if it comes down to it, we'll use the old standby."

"Hasn't failed us yet," Garrus mused. "Despite our best efforts."

"Any more questions?" Shepard asked. They shook their heads. "Okay. Get your gear prepped and go over the data on the enemy force. See if you can find anything useful that I or Fifth Fleet may have missed. We'll be at the Argos Rho Relay in an hour and at Naxos four hours later at cruising speed."

* * *

><p>Three hours later, Liara opened her locker and began pulling pieces of her gear out. A few steps away, Ashley was running last-minute checks on the squad's weapons. Garrus was somwhere behind them, immersed in recalibrating the Mako's guns.<p>

"I've been studying this Fettel's file," Liara said as she slipped out of her lab coat, leaving her in just her shirt and trousers.

"Find anything interesting?" Ashley asked as she finished reassembling an assault rifle.

"Nothing," Liara murmured. "Which bothers me more than a little." Ashley looked up at those words, frowning.

"That's not right," she said. "I thought FEAR and the Spectres kept detailed background files on all psychics."

"They do," Liara said with a nod. "Fettel's background is blank. There is nothing there."

"Even with Spectre authorization?" the human asked, and Liara nodded.

"I asked Shepard to clear it, but we have nothing beyond some basic information on his psychic abilities, some health data, and a registration record when he was seventeen. Family, birthplace, pre-registration history, and post-registration history are all blank."

Ashley set down the rifle she was examining, brow furrowing in thought.

"I don't think the Alliance would cover this up," she said after a few seconds. "Someone would notice a psychic without any information on him."

"I concur," Liara said with a nod. "I believe that Armacham may have been covering this information up. There's no real references to Fettel beyond this basic personnel profile. It seems like someone deliberately hid any information about him."

"ATC does some shady business, yeah," Ashley said, picking up a pistol. "But keeping a secret psychic to handle their secret Replica control program? That's pretty far-fetched. We're not talking insider trading or book-cooking or some gray-market arms contracts in the Terminus."

"Perhaps," Liara murmured, fitting her torso armor in place. "I can look into this further, but I have my suspicions."

"Hey, if you can find proof, I'll back you," Ashley said. "After all, you weren't wrong about your hunch on the Reapers."

"Thank you," Liara said. She shifted subjects to something more at hand. "Gunnery Chief, what do you know of the Replica? I have little experience with human military in general, and I've never had need to know of how the Replica operate."

"They're . . .creepy," Ashley said. "I've worked with a few Replica units before. Never willingly, but ATC uses them for security on some colonies. They're empty."

"What do you mean?" Liara asked, her curiosity piqued.

"I mean there's nothing behind those facemasks they wear," Ashley said. "Nothing human. They look like humans. They've got human genetic code. But you're never going to see them go out for a drink, or joke with their buddies, or be friendly to a kid, or do anything they haven't been ordered to do. They're like the geth in a way."

"But the geth have religion, and beliefs in their own way," Liara said, and Ashley nodded, brow still furrowing. She fiddled with the pistol in her hands.

"Less like geth," Ashley said. "More like mechs. Outside of combat, there's nothing there, and something about that is just so . . . Wrong."

"I see."

"I've seen them in action," Ashley continued, "Bottom line is, the only line they won't cross is the one their commanders tell them not to. Fight a Replica like you fight a geth. It won't stop shooting you until you kill it. They don't back down, they don't show remorse, and they never stop until they're ordered to."

"Thank you, Gunnery Chief," Liara said with a nod, finishing with her armor. "That was . . . illuminating."

* * *

><p>Two hours later, Joker dropped them out of FTL at the edges of the Minotaur System. With the <em>Normandy<em>'s stealth systems engaged, they cruised toward Naxos at full speed, with passive sensors ready and aimed at the planet. It was a classic garden planet suitable for carbon-based, oxygen-breathing life. Within minutes they were getting feeds from the surface in general and the colony in particular.

"Good news," Joker reported as Shepard stood behind him on the bridge, "The colony is, as of seventeen minutes ago based on light-lag, not on fire. Bad news, however, is that this Armacham compound your bad guys are working out of? Deserted."

Shepard leaned over the sensor image, and found himself agreeing. The compound itself was located a kilometer east of the boundaries of the main Naxos settlement, imaginatively named Naxos City. It was showing almost no thermal readings indicative of living beings, though the visual images showed pre-fab buildings, bunkers, vehicle sheds, and several outdoor firing courses in various states of having the shit blown out of them. He could see bodies littering the facility on the camera feeds.

"That had to be one hell of a fight," Garrus mused from the gunnery station.

"Commander," Pressly called from the navigation console. "I think I may have something for you."

Shepard stepped over to the navigator's seat, where he was poring over the sensor data in more detail than what Joker could manage. He was scanning Naxos City, and pointed to a significant cluster of thermal signatures at the northern part of the city.

"This is the spaceport," Pressly said. "There's a huge concentration of people there. Far more than normal for a spaceport. And it looks like the transmitter may be sending from somewhere inside the port."

"Any ships docked there?" Shepard asked.

"A couple of cargo haulers," Pressly replied. "Doesn't look like they're about to take off. Here, look." He brought up two overhead pictures of the ships in question: large, boxy, flat cargo ships like the kind Shepard had boarded countless times. Both of them had char marks and smoke issuing from their engine compartments.

"Someone disabled those ships," Shepard concluded, and Pressly nodded.

"Probably one of those Armacham guys," he suggested. "Blew the engines on the ships to keep them from getting off planet."

"And if the transmitter is right, Fettel is trying to repair the transports," Shepard said, and leaned back. He guessed at the distance between the spaceport and the city. It was close enough to cause substantial civilian casualties if it were bombed. On the other hand, they needed to solve this quickly. "Garrus, sight the spaceport with the main guns."

"Yeah, about that Commander," Joker said, "looks like the spaceport's got a kinetic barrier covering it."

"I can probably get through it with a concentrated barrage," Garrus suggested, "but that's going to cause a lot of collateral."

"Okay, we'll move that to Plan B."

"We have a Plan B?" Joker gasped. "Holy shit, that's more planning than we usually go through!"

"Joker," he growled, and gave the pilot a hard stare.

The pilot glanced back at Shepard, opened his mouth to say something, and then went pale at the Commander's glare. He swiftly turned back to his console and went back to work in silence.

* * *

><p>The <em>Normandy<em> roared down into the atmosphere of Naxos. Radar-absorbent materials hid them from most ground-based sensors, and the IES stealth system kept them off the screens of anything that the hull's composition didn't defeat. Nonetheless, an intense feeling of unease rolled through Shepard, settling into his gut. They didn't have much of a plan beyond a rapid deployment half a kilometer south of the spaceport in the urbanized area of the city. The _Normandy_ would come in low and fast, as usual, and roll the Mako out onto a wide road flanked by four-to-five-story pre-fab stacks. They would seen coming in, but that couldn't be avoided once the _Normandy_ entered visual range. Better to drop the Mako into maximum cover before Fettel and his Replica could react and advance as fast as possible before they could mobilize a response. The deployment flew in the face of conventional tank deployment doctrine, but between Joker and Pressly, Shepard had enough assurances that they could get the Mako down safely. They'd threaded a smaller needle while dropping the IFV on Illos.

The Mako was their one big advantage. Though there were three thousand Replica troops, their actual armament was mostly light infantry kit. They had maybe a single platoon of REV powered armor and a lot of transport trucks, but no actual armored cavalry. The Mako's mobility and firepower would be a massive boon, though mitigated by the terrain. It would get them to the spaceport perimeter, at the very least.

The squad piled into the Mako, along with a pair of Alliance Marines. Corporal Dilbague and Sergeant Maness would be providing fire support in the Mako once Shepard's team deployed on foot. Both were veterans who had been with Shepard since the start of his hunt for Saren.

"Commander," Joker called as they readied the mako for a hot-drop. "Got an update on that spaceport."

"Lay it on me," Shepard said as he settled into the driver's seat. He heard Liara murmur a prayer, though he never understood why she only did so when he took the controls of the IFV.

"There's a lot of thermal spikes inside the spaceport area," Joker reported. "A few around the spaceport too. Looks like someone's still fighting down there."

"ATC troops?" Garrus mused, and Shepard shrugged.

"Could be them or local militia. Either way its good for us," he said, and switched back to Joker. "See if you can raise them. We need to coordinate with them to find Fettel fast."

"On it. Looks like the LZ where we're going to drop you is clear. Most of the civilians are moving away from the spaceport, and there's no heat or eezo signatures around where we're dropping you."

"Good. Keep an eye out." Shepard checked the networked sensor feeds the Mako was getting from the _Normandy_. They were shooting over undeveloped wilderness, a few minutes from visual range of the city. "Don't stick around in case they've got AA operational."

"Commander, I don't tell you how to apply boot to ass," Joker replied. "So please don't tell me how to fly. Sir."

Shepard grunted and cut off the comm. Maybe all those times he'd hung up on the Council had rubbed off on Joker in all the wrong ways. Or maybe that was just Joker.

"Standby to drop," he called back to the rest of the team, and they sounded an affirmative. Shepard settled in behind the controls, and closed his eyes, waiting for the hatch to open.

Over the quiet thrumming of the Mako's engine, the hiss of air rushing past the _Normandy_, and his squadmates' quiet chatter, he thought he heard a child humming.

* * *

><p>From above, the main settlement of Naxos resembled any decent-sized colony that had enough time to begin digging in. Like many rapidly-growing colonies, a lot of its buildings were "stacks" of pre-fabricated living modules placed atop one another, intermixed with more permanent structures of metal and ceramic with established foundations. Concrete roads weaved throughout the settlement, and utility towers festooned with communications and sensory gear rose up around the settlement. Most of the outer districts were made up of module stacks while the areas closer to the spaceport were permanent structures. Most of the buildings were little more than four or five stories tall at their highest, but the spaceport loomed to the north, surrounded by the high walls necessary to contain errant spacecraft crash-landings or unexpectedly-powerful thruster wash. Smoke rose here and there around the spaceport, and flashes of light and strobing lines of tracers indicated the battle that was still ongoing within the shimmering blue dome of the kinetic barrier.<p>

The Mako LZ was in the middle of the street half a kilometer south of the spaceport. They had about fifteen meters' worth of clearance, and Joker's aim was true.

Apparently, so was the Replica's.

The Mako dropped out of the _Normandy's _deployment bay and plummeted toward the street. The thrusters automatically kicked in as the IFV descended, and right as the Mako slowed, a missile arced over the pre-fab rooftops and struck their shields.

The kinetic barrier absorbed most of the missile's explosive force, but enough superheated hypersonic shrapnel ripped through them and impacted the IFV to slew it sideways. The Mako slammed into the side of one of the pre-fab stacks and bounced off, tumbling toward the street below while belching smoke from rents in the perforated flank.

Within the Mako, the old adage held true: no matter how disciplined and experienced a soldier was, the moment your transport took fire, _everyone_ screamed. Shepard managed to keep it controlled, but everyone behind him reacted like every other soldier in history. He gritted his teeth as the Mako plummeted out of control toward the street below, and then _slowed_.

High-pitched cries of semi-panic drew out, deepening and becoming more hollow. Warning beeps from the console blurred together into drawn-out, quiet, unnatural howls, The shifting center of gravity resulting from the spinning vehicle suddenly crawled. Everything happened around him stretched out, and he had a moment to think.

His fingers moved over the controls for the Mako, adjusting the barriers and firing the thrusters. The IFV's computer reacted instantly to his orders, and the thrusters fired quickly, loosing rapid pulses that straightened out the Mako's fall. It spun back over, turret up and wheels down, and a heartbeat later Shepard released. The screams reverted to normal, the insistent squawking of the console returned to their rapid-fire barrage of annoyance, and the rest of the world resumed its previous hurried pace. The Mako crunched into the street, jolting everyone within around, then slid a couple of meters before coming to a halt.

He _slowed_ again, checking the displays and his squad's suit biomentrics. They were uninjured, but the Mako's diagnostics were reporting severe damage along the left side. Shepard then snapped back to normal speed.

"No contacts visible," he reported as he looked over the displays. "That missile must have been fired from the spaceport."

"Nothing on the gun cam either," Ashley replied from the turret's control chair in the middle of the Mako. He voice sounded only slightly rattled.

"Dismount and form a perimeter," Shepard ordered, and opened the hatch from his panel. "Sergeant, take the gunnery station. Corporal, take over here." He stood and shouldered his rifle, and he and Garrus dismounted from the Mako, sweeping the street outside.

The city from ground level matched what he'd seen from overhead, though this close he could see far greater detail among the latticework of pre-fabs that loomed overhead. A soot-stained sky stretch above between the tall walls of rectangular modules. He saw no movement beyond overhead clouds, and nothing showed up on his suit's sensors. In the distance, broken up by the buildings rising around them, he could hear fitful bursts of gunfire.

"Clear outside," he reported, and behind him Liara and Ashley emerged from the Mako, weapons raised.

"Mako's screwed," Ashley murmured, and Shepard nodded. He glanced back at the wounded IFV, and suppressed a grimace. Two of the left-side wheels were shredded, and the entire left flank was steaming from radiating heat - at least, where it hadn't been twisted and ripped apart by the shrapnel from the missile. The kinetic barriers were the only thing that kept the missile from penetrating the crew compartment and killing everyone on board.

"Okay, we'll have to move on foot then," Shepard concluded. "Marines, dismount. Liara, Ash, you're with me on Team One. Maness, Dilbague, you're with Garrus on Two. Cover our flank."

The Marines dismounted and acknowledged. Shepard brought up a local map and grimaced. Half a kilometer would be a hell of a jog, especially if they were going to be fighting enemy troops the whole way. The street was a bad place to be without the Mako's speed, armor, and firepower.

"Get off the street," he ordered, and gestured toward an alley between two module-structures. "Team One with me, Two cover our backs. We'll hit the spaceport on foot."

* * *

><p>The first three hundred meters were all too quiet. They moved through a prolonged advance-to-contact as the six veterans slid from room to room and module to module on street level. It was a continuous bounding advance, one squadmember moving forward while the other two covered, interspersed with frequent pauses as they checked scanners and listened carefully for possible movement. With every room they passed through on their way toward the spaceport, Shepard got more and more anxious. He was expecting the enemy to emerge, to be caught in a sudden ambush or trap, or for unexpected artillery strikes to hit their building.<p>

Instead, he was greeted by unnerving quiet, and no civilians were visible. That wasn't to say that there weren't any, but most of the civilians had fled the area around the spaceport, and the few that had remained with the Mako had come tumbling from the sky had decided to clear out or simply stay out of the Alliance team's way.

The only contact with anyone during that time came a few minutes into the advance, when Shepard took the lead into an alley between two module-stacks. He swept down one end of the alley while Ashley took the other, and then stepped into the next module's doorway on the other end of the narrow path between the two. It chimed open and he went in, rifle shouldered, and found a room only illiminated by a couple of holographic displays. He caught sight of a door open on the opposite side of the module, but Shepard had barely registered it before the door closed.

But in the dim light, he'd seen a small humanoid figure, maybe a child.

Shepard froze, and started forward, inhaling and exhaling. He held up a fist as he advanced.

"Watch your fire," he said. "I think I saw a civilian. Looked like a kid."

"You sure?' Ashley asked. "I got nothing on my scope." He frowned, then pulled up his thermals. Nothing came to his screen; the suit's scanners could pick out thermal signatures on the other side of module walls, and he wasn't seeing anything indicative of a living being, adult or child.

"Weird," he murmured, and shook his head before moving toward the far door. He keyed it open once his scanner showed no element zero masses outside. It slid up and aside, and Shepard stepped out into another alley, this one clear and empty. Ashley was right, there was no one else here.

Shepard advanced to the next door, and hoped he wasn't in the early stages of psychotic breakdown. Or worse; he'd seen what happened to the salarians on Virmire and Matriarch Benezia. If he was being influenced by Reaper indoctrination, even slightly . . . .

He didn't want to contemplate how badly that might end.

They moved through another couple of buildings, still without contact, when Joker's voice came over the radio.

"Commander, bad news," he said. "I've got movement. A lot of it, headed your way."

"How many?" Shepard asked.

"Maybe two platoons, about sixty to seventy badguys," Joker replied. "They must have figured out you were alive. They're headed your way, I put ETA at less than two minutes."

"Surprised they didn't send anyone earlier," Garrus commented. "Why would the Replica wait this long to send a search team?"

"We'll worry about that later," Shepard said. "Everyone get higher up. Head for the rooftops."

* * *

><p>Shepard spotted them on his sensors as he led the way up the latticework of stairs that curved around the outside of the module-stack. They moved in a loose skirmish line through the buildings ahead, advancing by squads with the two platoons spread out so that no one could easily pass them. That formation would let them catch and trap an enemy force while the rest of their squads would encircle. On the other hand, it would allow Shepard's team to assault and possibly wipe out one squad and punch through their line before the others could reach them, if they were fast and violent enough.<p>

But the fact that he could locate them on his sensors reminded Shepard of another old soldier's adage: if you could see them, they could see you, and that went extra for an age of ubiquitous hardsuits with thermal, EM, and element zero scanners. The enemy would know where they were by now, which meant they couldn't remain in place.

The module-stacks were only three to four meters apart, and that was where they split apart in the first place; for the most part they were bridged by other modules along the rooftops and upper "floors." Shepard led the way across the rooftops, the rest of the team double-timing behind him. The tops of the stacks weren't flat; more individual modules had been set up here alongside antennae and heating/cooling units, breaking up lines of sight and giving Shepard's team some cover from lateral fire.

On his sensor display he could tell that he was closing with one of the contact clusters indicating an enemy squad, only fifty meters away. He thought he could hear distant voices somewhere below, and their elevation markers indicated that they were ascending. In fact, _all_ the contact markers were ascending as they drew closer to his team.

Shepard didn't need to warn his squad. Both fireteams had their weapons up as they moved to contact. There was a virtual forest of antennae and cooling units in front of them, with a couple of scattered rooftop modules to their right, overlooking one of the stairwells the enemy were ascending. He sent a quick flash-command to Garrus' team to take cover in those modules while he, Ashley, and Liara moved toward the antennae farm and air conditioning units.

The trio almost reached cover when two fireteams of Replica reached the roof, ascending stairwells on opposite sides of the module-stack, at virtually the exact same time.

Shepard _slowed_.

In the brief few heartbeats of dilated time, he got his first detailed look at Replica soldiers in the flesh.

He'd gone over the details of their weapons and gear, and knew that Armacham had outfitted them with rugged, simple equipment due to their purpose as disposable shock troops. Their armor was a multi-layered collection of heavy and solid plates covering their torsos, arms, and legs, making them seem larger and bulkier than normal humans. They had a variant of the sealed N7 helmet Shepard wore, but instead of a faceplate there was a short, protruding pair of optics. Their armor was painted gray with dull green highlights, and their upper arm spaulders bore an emblem shaped like a wide "V" with flaring wings and a downward-pointing triangle in the gap between the letter's arms. Of the two four-man fireteams, one carried an Avenger-model rifle, two more were armed with Tempest submachineguns, and the fourth carried an Eviscerator shotgun.

All of this detail came in an instant of real-time, though for Shepard it stretched out for long moments as he observed both enemy fireteams. His rifle snapped up to his shoulder as he reached the cover of the cooling units, and he cut loose with two quick, carefully-aimed bursts at the leader of the left fireteam. They slammed into his shields, and the last two rounds blew past his barriers and went into the goggles over his eyes. He jerked and fell backward. Shepard snapped back to normal time as the clone went down.

"Contact! Multiple hostiles!" one of the Replica shouted, his voise distorted by an electronic speaker-filter. Or at least Shepard guessed that was what he shouted, for the remaining three clones did not so much as flinch at the death of their team leader. Their weapons rose and a storm of gunfire lanced across the rooftop, the reports of their shots and the impact of hypervelocity rounds drowning out the rest of their words. Shepard dropped behind cover, thankful for whatever insane engineer had decided that colonial cooling units needed to be rated to take anti-tank fire.

"One down," Garrus reported from his position across the roof, and the _thooming _report of his rifle echoed through the air. "Three left on this side."

"Keep them suppressed," Shepard ordered, and he rose, _slowing _again. He spotted the remaining three Replica as they bolted for cover, moving like characters in a slow-motion vid. He could pick out the individual flashes of fire from each soldier's rifle, and the hypersonic rounds from their weapons drifted past like angry, lethal snowflakes. Ashley's muzzle flashes strobed a couple of meters away, her dreadfully-slow rounds impacting with deadly accuracy, and each gunshot was a deep, resonating boom.

He highlighted one of the Replica on his HUD, and saw another twist and fall, bullets impacting along his flank. The clone spun around toward the rooftop, blood flying from rents punched in his torso plates; their armor was of good quality, but the gear Shepard's team carried was purchased, assembled, and modified from among the very best technology in the galaxy. "Good quality" wasn't good enough against a Spectre.

"Liara!" Shepard called as he snapped back to normal speed, and fired his rifle at the two remaining Replica. They reached another cooling unit and took cover, but Liara knew what he wanted and had already gauged the distance. Dark energy surged around the asari, and gravity intensified over the Replica's heads. A micro-singularity suddenly formed over the enemy position, signified by a tiny, swirling ball of blackness and distorted light patterns swirling around the intense mass effect field she generated. Both Replica let out shouts of surprise as the swift shift in gravity pulled them up off their feet, whipping them around the temporary singularity she created.

Neither Shepard nor Ashley hesitated. Blood erupted from the Replica as they were methodically gunned down, bright red gore trapped by the singularity and swirling around the dark point alongside the two clones' corpses. As the bodies fell a moment later, Shepard could hear slackening gunfire across the rooftop.

"Garrus?" Shepard called.

"They're more than suppressed, Commander," he reported. There was another deep, resounding blast from the turian's sniper rifle, and the incoming gunfire cut off completely. "That was the last one."

"Bastards should have fallen back," Corporal Dilbague said. "They just kept shooting even after we had superiority."

"Replica don't think for themselves," Garrus murmured. "They're more like organic mechs than sapients."

His words didn't have any malice or disgust in them, but that was more of a credit to Garrus' attitude than anything else. Many Citadel species had never taken a particular liking to the Replica program; the turians viewed it as "shortcutting" to a "proper" military force, while the asari found it ethically distasteful. Of the Council species, only the salarians had been accepting of the program.

Shepard hadn't particularly cared for the Replica program even before they'd started shooting at him, so he could understand Garrus' subdued but still negative feelings about using mentally stunted clone soldiers.

"Keep moving," Shepard ordered, starting across the rooftops. The rest of the squad followed suit, once more forming into their previous arrangement. He checked his sensors as they hurried north toward the gleaming blue dome of the spaceport, and saw-

Bullets lanced past, coming from their left, across the street. He spun, _slowing_, and squeezed off a couple of shots at moving figures on the far rooftops, more than fifty meters away. Three bursts put down another Replica. A second's head blew apart thanks to Ashley. He snapped back to normal, ducking and hunting for another target.

"Behind us!" Garrus reported. His rifle thundered, followed by a few more bursts of gunfire. On Shepard's display, Replica troops were closing from all sides, some gaining the rooftop behind them while others took up positions on either side, trying to get shots at the small team as they advanced.

Bullets punched through Replica troops as Garrus sighted them, individual rounds blowing through helmets or limbs. Ashley and the other two Marines put down lethally accurate fire, pounding through shields and pulping the flesh beneath heavy armor plating. A biotic thrust from Liara lifted one Replica and cast him off the rooftop, screaming, while a singularity snatched an entire fireteam off their feet and flung them about like windswept debris. And anytime Shepard had a clear shot, time dropped to a crawl as he took deadly advantage of the opening.

The six-man team kept moving, with the Replica closing in relentlessly on all sides. Shepard put precision rounds into a trio advancing behind them, and Garrus cut down another with a snapsot that took his weapon arm off at the bicep. Ashley scythed fire through two more across the street as they tried to set up a cross-fire. Bodies went tumbling aside as Liara pulled them off their feet and hurled them through the air. Blood ran freely on the rooftops as the team slew dozens.

On his sensors, Shepard saw more closing in. Additional squads and platoons were peeling off from other areas of the city, zeroing in on the new threat. They seemed to care nothing for their losses.

He grit his teeth and did the only thing he could do. He pressed on, pushing the team to keep moving, to keep fighting, and to reach the objective.

Find Paxton Fettel. Kill him. End this whole situation with a single bullet.

* * *

><p>One by one, data inputs were snuffed out.<p>

He winced as the phantom pains of each of the linked soldiers flared and faded. It was a troubling but ultimately trivial price to pay to give the dying tools under his command his direct attention.

He watched from the perspectives of dozens of eyes, looking through dozens of scopes and scanners, as they circled around the new arrivals. Already he had lost fifty-three men, with that number rising every minute. They relentlessly advanced across the rooftops, and with each set of eyes he put on the intruders, he got a better picture of who they were, and who was commanding them.

Their leader moved like a blur, his entire body shifting quickly, almost instantly, to respond to new threats. So many of the minds he was directing managed to only get a glimpse of the enemy commander going from normal movement speed to a sudden blur before fading and dying in a burst of sympathetic pain and hot blood. How curious.

How . . . _familiar_.

His mouth quirked up a bit, and he turned, striding across the spaceport terminal. It had previously been used to load and unload cargo and personnel, and blue-armored figures now lay strewn across its floor from when they had fought to keep it secure. Now it was filled with his own men, squads of guards covering each entrance while others worked sensor terminals and communications channels through hardcase-protected computers. He could hear gunfire outside as his troops continued fighting to secure total control over the spaceport and repair the docked ships. The corpses of the

_**murderers **__soldiers thieves __**cowards **__nothing but __**cowards **__who took _it all from _you __**me **_**him **_all_

had been cleared away only so it would be easier to set up the command gear. His own troops had been left where they lay as well; the Replica placed no value on their own dead beyond the ammunition and gear still strapped to their bodies.

Theoretically, the Replica didn't need communications systems; he could give them orders at the speed of thought. But focusing on controlling three thousand soldiers at once was disconcerting to say the least; it was far easier to just focus his control and input on a few troops at a time and give the force's command units general orders, then let them carry them out. As long as they had orders and an overall objective, the Replica were quite competent.

He paused next to one of the operations units, which was commanding the effort to repair one of the transports. Instead of asking what the progress was, he simply reached into its memory and pulled the most recent report. Thoughts and ideas and images and statistics burst out and slid into his mind, flowing in a river made up of sensation instead of liquid. He quickly received a full report on their progress, and a quick check of the units under that officer's command further fleshed out the progress of the repairs. It took only a few seconds to sort it all out.

They would be off this planet soon. A couple more hours would be all it would take. And once they had escaped, he would go hunting. He knew who he needed to find, he just needed to locate them.

Then they would _die._

* * *

><p>Joker watched the battle play out below, while keeping the <em>Normandy<em> safely in low orbit. He hadn't spotted any surface to space weapons systems capable of picking off ships this high up; most spaceport and anti-air guns were intended to defend against pirates or slavers, who had to actually approach the colony in question. As long as he kept this high up the Normandy was safe.

"You guys locked down this Fettel jackass yet?" Joker asked.

"Working on it," Pressly replied. "I'm pretty sure he's in the spaceport's main terminal. Signal hasn't moved much since we dropped the ground team."

"Right, I'll signal Shepard once they'd broken free of those guys on the ground." He glanced back at his camera feeds and the data from the squad's suits. "Damn, they're really ripping it up down there. I almost feel sorry for those Repli-"

The radiation sensors suddenly squawked a warning as an emission flare erupted three light-seconds out, just over the horizon of Naxos.

"Incoming ship!" reported one of the ensigns. Joker couldn't remember her name. "Dropping from FTL. Ladar pings it at cruiser-size. I'm getting weird radiation markers."

"Is it Alliance?" Joker asked, bringing the Normandy around. Hackett's brief said reinforcements were en route, but this was earlier than even the best estimates.

"Does not match any Alliance or Citadel profiles," Ensign What's-Her-Name said as the vessel rapidly approached, closing to within two light seconds. "Could be a batarian or Terminus design."

Joker checked the ladar display and EM profiles from the approaching ship, and agreed with Ensign Who-Were-You-Again's assessment. It had a weird, almost spiky midsection, and the prow of the ship was a misshapen collection of rounded, jabbing spikes that looked somewhere natural rock and almost organic growths. Emissions coming from the ship seemed red-shifted compared with those from Naxos, as if outgoing emissions were being slowed by a stasis field or some other mass effect barrier.

"Never seen anything like-" Joker started to say, and then he altered the _Normandy's _course, jerking it sideways, purely on instinct.

An instant later there was a massive flare of energy on the sensors, and a golden beam lanced out of the center of the alien ship, tearing a gouge in the _Normandy's _flank and sending it spinning sideways, venting boiling gases and vaporized armor plating.

* * *

><p><em><strong>Codex - Technology - Psychics: Overview<strong>_

_Psychics are rare individuals capable of unusual reality-altering abilities. While scientifically quantifiable, psionic powers are poorly understood, as the precise mechanism behind how they work has never been identified despite thousands of years of study by the Citadel. Dark energy and gravity fields have been identified in lab tests, but psychic powers appear to operate independent of element zero, and certain psychic abilities, such as telepathic communication, do not involve gravity manipulation or dark energy at all._

_The most common form of psychic ability is telepathic communication, and is the only known ability that can be used by psychics of all organic species. Telepathy is only possible between psychic individuals, however, and "mind control" is nearly impossible. Only the strongest and most experienced psychics have been able to directly influence others, though less powerful psychics can generate telepathic hallucinations. For these reasons Citadel law mandates that no psychic is permitted to maintain any form of public office, though this is waived for asari due to the latent psychic abilities of the entire species. Asari may only maintain public office after rigorous training to resist psychic control, and high-ranking officials are always accompanied by non-asari, non-psychic bodyguards in case of an incident._

_Psionics typically manifest at a young age, usually in the formative "teenage" years, though in some cases psychic ability becomes apparent at much older or younger ages. Control of psychic ability is difficult, as while the precise means and mental process varies from individual to individual, most abilities require intensive concentration. During this time brain activity jumps up several times the norm, with significant electrical discharges throughout the cerebellum and cerebral cortex, or other species' equivalent. Activation of psychic abilities typically triggers an adrenaline and endomorphin release, causing a chemical "psi-high." Overuse of psychic abilities or pushing psychic abilities too hard can result in severe headaches, physical injury, brain damage, and even brain-death. _

_Psychic powers manifest very rarely. Typically, a relatively strong psychic will appear once out of every two hundred and fifty to five hundred million people, while much weaker "latent" psychics will appear once out of every fifty to one hundred million. This number can rise or fall depending on the species. For example, krogan produce strong psychics on the order of one per hundred million and latents of one per million. Turians produce fewer strong but more latent psychics. Almost all asari have latent psychic abilities, allowing them to "meld" with other species regardless of psionic ability, but powerful psychics appear much more rarely on the order of one per three hundred million. Humans, however, have the most strong psychics of any species, producing one latent per five hundred thousand and one strong psychic per twenty-five million._

_Due to the destructive nature of psionics, most governments maintain records of known psychic individuals, who are kept separate from regular society. Most psychics are employed by their respective governments' militaries, and are usually well-compensated for their not-entirely-voluntary service. Most species also maintain specialist military units for dealing with psychic threats, be they out-of-control psionics who have just manifested their powers, agents of rival or enemy governments, or the rare psychic criminal. The Asari Republics maintain the Justicar Order, which also serves as an active law-enforcement element. The Turian Hierarchy has the Blackwatch special operations unit. The Salarian Union maintains the Supernatural Intervention Force, a subset of the Special Tasks Group. The Human Systems Alliance operates the First Encounter Assault Recon division, the largest psychic-operations unit in Citadel Space._

* * *

><p><em><strong>Author's Notes: <strong>_Integrating the two settings is both more and less difficult than I expected. The biggest challenge is integrating psionics with the setting, while the easiest part is integrating the rest of the technology and economic/political base. I do have to give credit to the loony group over at Spacebattles who helped me flesh out some ideas here.

So yes, we've got, in no particular order, Shepard's team, Alma, Paxton Fettel, Replica, ATC, _and_ the Collectors coming together in the feel-good clusterfuck of the century. Things can only get better from here!

Until next chapter . . . .


	3. Interval 1: Chapter 2

_**Interval One: Revolution**_

_**Chapter Two: Descent**_

"_The Replica represent a bankruptcy of staggering proportions, morally, ethically, and honorably. They are a deliberate corruption of the human genome to produce disposable soldiers, which cheapens the sacrifice of sapients who give their lives to defend their people, be they volunteer or conscript. Not even the krogan accept tank-bred soldiers. Creation of a form of sapient life for the sole purpose of warfare, even one as mentally deficient as the current generation of Replica, is morally reprehensible and ethically hollow. There is no place in the modern world for soldiers whose sole purpose is to die."_

_-Primarch Nicta Calderus, "Paradigms and Morality of Genetic Warfare" (2182)_

"_Primarch Calderus's assertion is only slightly flawed. Allow me to more precisely correct him: There is no place in the modern world for soldiers with any purpose other than to die. What difference is there between the drone used to draw fire, and the Replica that guards a doorway? Cognition? Ambition? Morality? The Replica, like so many other weapons of war, possess meaning through purpose. Varren are purpose-bred for war. Vorcha are purpose-adapted for warfare and little else. Krogan have been purposed for war, no matter what prettied words the salarians used during the Rachni Wars. The entire turian species has been built into a powerful war machine through the systematic denial of the right to say "No, I do not wish to." What makes the human genome sacred when the Council has used entire sapient species as cannon fodder and neutered them when their folly became apparent? With the Replica, there is no question of what they _could_ be. They_ are."

_-Sheng-Ji Yang, Armacham Technology Corporation Director of Ethics, Official Press Release 9/14/2182_

* * *

><p>The star was dying.<p>

Not that said fact terribly mattered on the scale that galactic civilization progressed. The old red giant may have been in the last throes of its life, expanding swiftly as the hydrogen reaction at its heart ran down, but to the short-lived beings on the tiny speck of metal and ceramic and element zero that circled the dying star, they would be long dead before its last fitful bursts of fusion heralded the conclusion of its billions-years existence.

He fancied old supergiants like this one. Witnessing the last gasps of the eldest of stars in the galaxy gave him a reminder of how temporary organic life was. Even Reapers could die, while these unfathomably old forces of the universe endured. It was a good reminder of the reality of the universe, of how cold and uncaring and enduring the whole was. Every sapient species in the galaxy could die at this moment, and the stars would never notice.

Whenever the ethics of his existence troubled him, he would just look out at that the old stars his station orbited around, and remind himself that in the grand scheme of things, the suffering of thousands was truly meaningless.

That perspective had carried him far. It had pushed him to abandon his old name and identity, and adopt something new. Where once he had been finite, a single man fighting for corporate money, now he was now the embodiment of an ideal. Jack Harper had . . . Evolved, for a lack of a better term, into what the Alliance had dubbed "an illusive man." An apt appellation.

The console beeped, and he exhaled. The sharp scent of the cigarette drifted out of his mouth, and he faintly felt the burn of lethal chemicals taken in just miniscule amounts to hurt but not kill. The auto-healing implants in his chest were doubtless even then countering the poisons he pumped into his lungs, but the brief burn in his chest was the whole point.

The console beeped again, and he shook his head. Drifting moments like this were when he did his best work, but he brought himself out of the haze and focused again. Implants within his brain secreted a slight bit of stimulant, and his mind sharpened almost instantly. He sat forward, tapping the console's haptic display. Pressure buzzed up his fingers, and he hit a few more icons on the display, opening the communications link. Two seconds passed as the encryption protocols went through their handshake protocol, and a screen popped up in front of his display, showing an audiographic reading of the voice that came through on the other end.

"Go ahead," he ordered.

"The situation on Naxos is deteriorating faster than anticipated," reported the speaker on the other end. The voice was undergoing standard distortion, as this particular communication was forced to go through the comm buoy network instead of quantum entanglement.

"How long until the trace is finished?" the Illusive Man asked.

"Unknown at this point, sir," the electronic voice replied. "The signal is erratic. It's not just stellar drift and orbital corrections that we have to account for. The synchronicity signal is not following a predictable pattern."

"Unsurprising, considering the nature of the human mind," the Illusive Man mused. "Continue attempting to lock it down. If we could even narrow down the point of origin to a single cluster, that will cut the odds down significantly."

"Yes sir," replied the voice. "There are other complications, though." The Illusive Man nodded, gesturing for the voice to continue. Though they were communicating via audio transmission only, his suite recognized the gesture and sent a cue to the other end. "The Alliance dispatched a ship to the site. We confirmed it as the _SSV Normandy_."

The Illusive Man's eyes narrowed, and he picked up a decanter next to his chair. He poured a couple of fingers as he pondered the implications.

"I assume Shepard is on the ground?" he asked.

"We confirmed a Mako dropped from the _Normandy_, but was shot by an anti-armor missile," the voice reported. "Point of origin unknown, but it came from the general direction of the spaceport. I couldn't ID the shooter."

"Irrelevant," the Illusive Man said. "He's on the ground and alive, correct?"

"Replica forces have been engaged in heavy fighting with someone in the district around where the vehicle went down. I estimate at least a hundred casualties."

Which meant that Shepard was unquestionably on the surface.

"Is the erratic nature of the signal coinciding with Shepard's arrival?" the Illusive Man asked. There was a pause.

"Partially," the voice reported. "There was a forty-two percent spike in variation between signal pulses upon the Normandy's arrival in-system."

Very interesting.

"I doubt we'll be able to determine point of origin with Shepard moving on his own through the colony," the Illusive Man said. "Keep trying. If it looks like the Replica have sensed your presence, go dark and maintain passive observation. Until then, continue attempting a trace."

"Understood, sir."

He cut the line of communication, picked up his glass, and peered into the swirling reaction of the dying star. Were it not for the station's shielding . . . Well, he would be getting a firsthand view of the event, directly from her.

She remembered. And unlike the others, she could find him.

Glittering blue eyes watched the old giant pass into its death throes, and the Illusive Man took a sip, losing himself in thought once more as the alcohol burned down his throat. He peered through the windows of his gilded, self-imposed cage, and pondered how to keep turning this to his advantage.

* * *

><p>The <em>Normandy <em>skittered sideways, and Joker rolled the ship's thrusters underneath the beam as the entire frigate shuddered. Heat flared through the ship, the entire left port flank of the Normandy sending damage reports as the beam sheared through the upper deck armor. Screams and warning klaxons resounded throughout the ship, and internal heat had jumped up so high that sweat started gathering on Joker's forehead in seconds.

He weaved the _Normandy _beneath the beam, relative to the enemy ship, and then fired thrusters while flipping the frigate onto a heading perpendicular to the hostile's course. His eyes flicked over the incoming damage reports, noting that despite significant damage to the upper port decks, their weapons and engines were still almost fully functional. The stealth systems would be fried until they could hit a drydock, but until then the _Normandy _could keep fighting. Upper compartments around the CIC just down the corridor behind him were sealing off, and crew were scrambling for breathers.

The only good news was that he'd seen the attack coming in time to dodge. If that shot had been a few meters lower and to the right, it would have sheered through their engines and left the _Normandy _crippled, letting the alien cruiser finish them off at will.

On the ladar, he saw the enemy ship turn to pursue, but with its sheer bulk and mass it would take precious seconds to bring the main gun to bear on the frigate. The prow of the massive ship was practically glowing with radiating heat as it vented from the main gun and charged up the next shot.

But instinct still directed Joker's blurring hands as he guided the Normandy away from the target, and he sent the frigate into another evasive pattern. A couple of seconds later, a second beam sliced through the void along the _Normandy's _original path, even though the massive organic/rock-like alien ship hadn't lined up its axis with the frigate.

"Off-axis beam weaponry, great," Joker hissed under his breath as he kept the ship dodging. Options flicked through his mind. There was absolutely no way the _Normandy _could take a ship of that size; its armament was impressive for a frigate but by itself it didn't have the firepower to tackle anything more than a light cruiser with any hope of success. The sheer power output and size of the alien vessel - almost as big as a full-on dreadnought - meant fighting was suicide. But Shepard was still down on the ground.

Technically, Pressly was in charge when Shepard was away, but the lieutenant was really just an operations manager. In combat, Joker was unofficially in charge of the ship, and right now Pressly was knee-deep in damage control at his console. Thus, it all boiled down to Flight Lieutenant Jeff Moreau's ability to assess the situation and make the right call.

They couldn't win in a straightforward fight. The _Normandy _was damaged, crew were dying, and waste heat was building up faster than they could vent it; radiation from the last near-miss had cut combat endurance down to less than a minute. There weren't any other options he could see, and while it felt wrong on every level, Joker knew they only had one option to survive.

Joker grit his teeth, made the call, and engaged the mass effect field around the ship that would let them cheat physics. The enemy ship charged up another shot, but the instant before it fired the _Normandy _vanished into a corridor of red-shifted light.

* * *

><p>Hypervelocity rounds flattened and deflected off Shepard's shields, and he slid into cover behind another air-conditioning unit on the rooftop. Liara's biotics pulsed next to him in a swirl of dark energy, and another Replica went flying. Rounds scythed in from more than a dozen directions as the Replica closed in on all sides. The six-man squad returned fire with lethal efficiency; Shepard estimated that they had killed more than a hundred Replica by this point. But the clones did not seem particularly concerned by their casualties, and it was becoming harder to keep the fire off of his squad as they advanced, as the enemy became more organized and brought more troops to bear.<p>

Shepard shot up to his feet, slowing, and picked targets. A Replica fireteam was twenty meters ahead, behind some more cooling units, with another fireteam moving to a line of rooftop modules to the right that would let them set up a crossfire. A platoon were across the street, firing suppressive bursts that kept Shepard's team on the far side of the rooftop, and another squad was thirty meters behind them, spreading out to better firing positions. Ashley and Sergeant Maness were keeping the enemy to the rear suppressed, while Garrus picked off targets across the street as fast as his rifle could cool down. Sensors showed more Replica below, ascending toward the rooftop.

"Liara, sweep targets!" Shepard ordered as he highlighted the fireteam behind the cooling units. Liara breathed an acknowledgement, and another micro-singularity burst into place above the enemy troops. Shepard and Corporal Dilbague, a few meters to his left, opened fire on the enemy as they were pulled into the air. A couple of seconds later, Shepard rushed around the cooling unit and waved the squad forward. He ran along the edge of the rooftop opposite the street, weapon up. He advanced a few steps, and then a metallic climbing claw latched onto the edge of the module two meters to Shepard's right.

A Replica surged onto the rooftop. A small but powerful motor in the claw yanked the clone soldier up to the ledge, and with one arm gripping the side of module, the Replica hauled himself and the full kit he wore up over the side with about as much difficulty as stepping over a knee-high hedge. He rose up, rifle shouldered and tracking Shepard.

Three more clambered up onto the roof around him.

Shepard _slowed_. The first Replica's weapon dragged to a crawl, and Shepard's left arm snapped up, smacking the barrel of the rifle aside. His own weapon rose up, and he jammed it into the Replica's neck, the barrel passing through the clone's kinetic barrier. He squeezed the trigger, and a five-round burst punched through the thin armor-fabric over the clone's throat. Blood and bone exploded out of the back of the Replica's neck, and as it fell backwards Shepard snapped his left hand forward and caught the front plating of the soldier's armor. He whirled and shoved the dying clone into the closest of his companions to his immediate left, and both went tumbling off the side. The other two gained the edge of the roof.

Pain edged in at the back of Shepard's head, but in the window of dilated time, he could make out the details clearly as the clone soldiers began to raise weapons. To his immediate right a Replica leveled a shotgun at his chest while to the left the other was bringing up a submachinegun. The shotgun-wielder was faster on the draw, but was too close.

Shepard twisted around as the shotgun discharged, the roar of the weapon an agonizing and drawn-out blast barely muffled by his helmet. Hypervelocity slugs dragged past him as he stepped in closer, and he punched the Replica in the head with his left hand, the blow starting from his waist and pouring down his shoulder into a solid cross into the clone's optics.

To Shepard's perspective, the movement of his arm was at normal speed. To his opponent, the fist struck so fast that it was a blur of metal and ceramic plating and a flaring kinetic barrier. For a normal human, a punch like that would do almost as much damage to oneself; the human body was not designed to handle throwing blows that did not so much break bone as they _powdered_ it. When his fist moved that quickly, however, Shepard's hardsuit and omnitool recognized what he was doing and activated a dual-layered kinetic barrier around his forearm; the end facing the Replica was hardened to impart maximum force based on the shape of Shepard's fist, while the inner layer formed a gravitic cushion to protect his arm from the inevitable reaction to his action, absorbing the kinetic energy in a series of mass effect barriers that behaved much like ballistic gel.

Outwardly, the shifting gravity and dark energy took on a blurred, rippling effect. But from his perspective, Shepard could clearly see the barriers shaping around his forearm as it impacted with the Replica's kinetic barrier. He saw the miniscule emitters in the cloned soldier's armor flare and go dark, the azure corona of the shield dissipating under the blow, and his fist slamming into the faceplate. Backed by sheer velocity and shielded by the multiple layers of boosted barriers in his forearm, his fist drove into the Replica's optics and smashed them back into the soldier's face, with the helmet crumpling around the point of contact like an eggshell. Blood erupted out a literal heartbeat later, and the Replica's head snapped backward, sending loose gore arcing up into the air. Its limbs went limp, flopping outward in a single spasm of shock.

Shepard saw the whole gory tableau in minute detail. It dragged on, the Replica driven backward into a deceptively graceful backflip, head twisted and spraying blood. The barriers and fields around Shepard's forearm rippled outward in response to the kinetic impact before dissipating. He could perceive every step of the brutal, high-tech, psionically-boosted burst of violence.

To everyone outside of Shepard's dilated time-perspective, however, it simply looked like the Commander had punched a Replica with a blurring, flaming blue fist so hard that it sent the clone tumbling through the air fifteen meters away.

Spikes of agony started jabbing into Shepard's skull at the Replica flew away, and he spun, pushing his body as much as he could. The last Replica was leveling its Tempest, and the weapon flashed, bullets crawling out of the submachinegun's muzzle. Three of them impacted his shield, and Shepard sidestepped out of the line of fire. He could see his own reflection in the Replica's optics with each gun flash.

Then a shimmering blue discus arced in from his left, where Liara had been crouched, careening in at a stately pace toward the Replica. The pain running through Shepard's head intensified, and he couldn't hold it any longer. He released, snapping back to normal speed, and the hollow roar of the Tempest turned into a rapid high-pitched zipper-whine, following an instant later by the distinctive _bwoom _of the solidified dark energy field associated with a biotic throw. The Replica was launched off the side of the building as if hit by a transport aircar.

Shepard's legs wobbled for a moment, and he dropped to one knee, his vision going white as the pain flared up and then started to subside. He fought the urge to deploy painkillers; the headaches were the only way to warn him if he was pushing his body to the point of inflicting brain damage. If he'd kept using his psionics for a few more seconds he might have passed out and never awoken.

An arm looped under his left shoulder, and he heard Ashley call his name. He struggled to his feet, the battle still raging around him. He opened his eyes, vision clearing, and brought his rifle up. On his sensor displays, Replica were still closing in. He counted nearly a hundred contacts on the rooftops alone. He nodded to Ash as he steadied himself, and made a quick decision.

"We're taking too much fire! Break contact," he ordered. "We have to get downstairs! Ash, point!"

"On it," Ashley replied, and took the lead. The rest of the team followed, bounding from cover to cover. The pain in Shepard's head faded quickly, and in its stead was a faint sense of euphoria. Psi-high wasn't as potent in physicals like Shepard, especially when compared with manifesters, pyros, and renders.

Unfair.

He followed after Ashley, covering her.

Movement ahead. He slowed, squeezing several shots, and the Replica ducked behind cover before he could break through its shields. They'd realized just how powerful his team's weapons were.

They were learning fast.

* * *

><p>Paxton Fettel hovered somewhere between control and madness.<p>

For most of his life it had been easier. But he felt the flow interweaving, thoughts colliding and clashing. It came in fitful spurts, bursts of memory, emotion, images, sensations. But intermixed with them was understanding and purpose.

_They all deserved to die._

He clung to that simple concept. It made things clearer. When in doubt, kill. That was something he could _control_.

Fettel shifted between soldiers throughout the facility, taking in their perceptions. He jumped to a squad assaulting an Armacham Port Security team, and felt the phantom pains as two of the Replica were killed covering the rest of the squad as they moved in close and gunned the enemy down. He moved to an engineering team working on repairing the engines another Armacham team had damaged with incendiaries. He shifted to the guards outside, covering the main entrance, and then hopped between multiple units pursuing . . . Him.

Minds dimmed one by one as they tried to bring down he group surrounding him, and he could feel their bodies being ripped apart or blasted to pieces or hurled off the rooftops. They were bursts of dull agony, like distant echoes or splashes of water soaking his skin from nearby raindrops. Yet despite losing an entire company and more of soldiers trying to bring them down, he saw no appreciable reduction in their combat ability, and none of the enemy had been wounded or killed.

It seemed a waste.

He scowled and nodded. Yes. This was a waste of resources. He didn't need to kill him, after all; he just needed to delay him. Besides, throwing squads of Replica at him at this point was just going to get his troops killed. Better to reprioritize his resources, especially considering the forty percent casualties he'd sustained thus far.

Fettel pulled himself back to his own mind and glanced to the command units, and located them in the swirl of signals racing around him. They opened up to him, and he flowed a part of his consciousness into them, feeding his will to their minds. They reacted instantly.

"Delta Company, disengage targets. Retreat to spaceport and secure Point Sigma."

* * *

><p>"Stairway down!" Ashley reported as they advanced, firing a long burst at the Replica as they closed in. She started down an exterior stairway into the top level of modules, and Adam followed, weapon pointed over her shoulder. The rest of the team followed suit, and as they descended the Replica fire intensified. A torrent of rounds skipped off the hardened metal rooftop of the module, but by that point the squad was out of the line of fire. Ashley stopped at the top level's doorway and keyed it open, and they went inside, sweeping for threats.<p>

It was a standard apartment module, messy with the detritus of both a lived-in space and something that had been hastily abandoned. No one was visible, and it looked-

Adam opened fire right next to her, and Ashley jerked at the sudden roar of his weapon. She whirled, bringing her own rifle to bear, but his weapon went silent just as abruptly. Bullet holes pockmarked a closed door.

"Jesus!" Ashley said under her breath, spinning to check the other side of the room. The rest of the squad piled in, with Garrus taking up the rear. She took another breath to speak, but then stopped.

The six months spent with Adam Shepard had seen a lot of weirdness. Most of it alien, but some of it from him. She'd expected some oddness out of him from the start; their first meeting on Eden Prime had been when he'd blurred past her with an overheating rifle and snap-kicked a geth so hard its torso went flat. Physicals were distinctive like that, and by the end of the first month she'd gotten accustomed to his abrupt bursts of blurring speed, incredible physical strength, and impossibly precise aiming. It had taken longer to get used to the eyes that bored right through her, or the paranoia; he'd switched to the pistol because there wasn't enough room in the bed for the both of them _and_ the shotgun. There was also his tendency toward unexpected bursts of violence, as that reporter had discovered when he'd grabbed her by the throat, snarled something about "counterfactual assertions," and thrown her into the Presidium lake.

The hallucinations were new, though, and they had her worried. A psychic with hallucinations was either getting fucked with by another psychic, or was sliding down the slope toward insanity thanks to mental strain. But she couldn't voice her concerns now, not in the middle of action. They needed to be focused, and she couldn't do that by second-guessing Adam.

Shepard lowered his weapon and his helmet's HUD flashed up. His body twitched slightly - the outward sign that he was "slowing" - and a moment later his helmet snapped up and he pointed to a door.

"That way," he ordered, and Ashley immediately started toward the door. She keyed it open and swept the corridor beyond, running between modules. "The Replica are surrounding us," Shepard continued, "but we can lose them inside the structure long enough to reach the spaceport. There's enough interference in there that we can avoid their scanners."

Ashley nodded in agreement as she led the way down the passage.

"_Normandy_, this is Shepard," he called as she checked a couple of doors. Garrus covered the opposite side of the passage, while Maness and Dilbague paired up behind them. The rooms beyond were clear. "_Normandy_, report."

She checked her own comm, but there was no response.

"Joker should have responded immediately," Liara said. "Something's wrong."

"Yeah, but what?" Shepard asked. Ashley felt a sinking sensation in her gut, the kind of thing that dozens of mindless cloned supersoldiers shooting at her didn't elicit.

"If something happened, why didn't he signal us?" she asked.

"We _were _in the middle of getting shot at," Garrus remarked. "But I don't see how we could have missed a distress call. Unless whatever happened hit so fast that he didn't have time to send it."

"I'll keep trying to raise him," Shepard said, and nodded down the corridor. "Let's get moving before the Replica find us."

Ashley nodded and pressed onward.

* * *

><p>"They're retreating," Garrus reported a couple of minutes later, and Shepard glanced at his display. The sensor contacts indicating the Replica units were all moving north toward the spaceport, but they were also moving <em>away<em> from his squad. Ahead, Ashley reached a door that opened outside, and was sweeping the exterior. She froze for a moment, as if spotting a contact, but held fire.

"Confirm that," she reported. "Contacts on ground level, but they're running north."

"In that case," Liara said, "Trap?"

"Oh, yeah, definitely," Shepard replied with a nod. "Only question is whether they're going to try to ambush us or simply set up a new defensive line to stop us."

"We would pick out any ambush, unless they start jamming us," Liara said. "More likely they will attempt to fortify any entrance. They certainly have the numbers."

"If they had the numbers to spare they wouldn't have sent only a few platoons at us," Ashley pointed out. "Especially after we wiped out a few squads wholesale. We never saw more than a hundred at any point, right?" Garrus nodded.

"Which means most of Fettel's resources are tied up elsewhere, either securing the spaceport or fighting off Armacham troops inside the port." His mandibles tightened a bit. "He's probably taken heavy losses. Even three thousand Replica would have taken a lot of casualties breaking out of a secure facility, especially one guarded by a battalion's worth of security mercs. That port's a big facility. They can't cover every entrance and repair the freighters and subdue the rest of the security forces. At least not without compromising some point in their defense line."

"So, front gate?" Shepard said, and the others went silent for a moment. Garrus nodded, thoughtful.

"An option, but not the one I'd pick." He brought up the schematic of the spaceport, and that appeared on everyone's HUD. "There's underground maintenance accessways scattered around the outer blast wall. They can't cover all of those. We move fast and keep out of sight, beyond short-range element zero scanners, and we should be able to breach one of those and get down into the understructure of the spaceport."

"The blast shielding should hide us from their scanners," Liara added. "We can move undetected."

Shepard's eyes flicked back and forth with psychic-enhanced speed, apparently looking over the data. He finally nodded.

"Good plan," he said. "We'll hit this access point here." He highlighted one about two hundred meters away. It was the base of the blast wall surrounding the port, separated from the main entrance by another hundred meters and a couple of intervening module-buildings.

"Sounds like a plan," Ashley said, and Liara, Garrus, and the other two Marines nodded.

* * *

><p>It took them fifteen minutes to get there, moving as fast as they could in hostile territory without compromising their own security. They moved from building to building, carefully sweeping each room and checking for ambushes or traps that managed to evade their suit scanners. However, the Replica kept their distance, and no one showed up on their scanners. Not that Shepard trusted them indoors.<p>

They exited the apartments close to the spaceport, the blast wall looming overhead, and started down a flight of exterior stairs. A service road ran around the exterior of the spaceport, a thin paved path only a few meters wide. Module-towers rose on either side of them, restricting their view, and unease settled over Shepard as they reached ground level. The Replica could easily snipe them from any angle.

His sensors remained clear, especially the MkI Eyeball, so he led the team down to the access hatch. It was surrounded by a metal gate and fence, which were barely speedbumps to them. A couple of unused maintenance vehicles were parked nearby, rugged old hovercraft that wouldn't have been out of place in a military convoy with hulls thick enough to resist small arms fire. He noted their presence, and his feeling of unease grew, when he knew it should be subsiding.

Something breathed on his neck, and he spun around suddenly and shouldered his rifle again, making the rest of the team drop into a crouch as well. His rifle jerked around a few times before he stopped and exhaled.

"Shepard?" Liara asked, and he shook his head.

"Thought I heard something," he said. He then gestured toward the hatch. "Garrus, Dilbague, Ash, Maness, security. Liara, unlock the door, I'll cover you."

"I can get through it faster," Garrus said, but Shepard shook his head.

"I need you on security. Watch those rooftops." Shepard did not add that he trusted Garrus' senses more than his own right now. As a psychic tackling another psychic, it was possible that Fettel could be playing with his perceptions.

Garrus nodded, mandibles twitching unhappily, and stepped outside the gate. He and Dilbague took cover behind the maintenance vehicles while Ashley and Maness took cover across the street under the cover of the building. Liara moved to the door, omnitool lighting up, and Shepard crouched behind her.

"Shepard, are you okay?" she asked him, linking to his suit specifically. He frowned and shook his head after a moment.

"No," he replied. "But its not important right now. We have to end this rampage soon."

"That's just it, though," Liara murmured. The door chirped quietly as she worked her way through the lock; she wasn't the best hacker, but she had a working knowledge of electronics which had only expanded in her time working with Shepard's crew. "We're taking on a psychic here. And you haven't been well since we stopped Sovereign."

"We can worry about my mental health after we put Fettel down," Shepard said quickly, and she nodded.

"I understand." She paused, frowning. "Almost got it. Give me a few more seconds."

Shepard opened his mouth to call for the others to move up, when his HUD exploded with a sudden blast of static and squealing electronics. He jerked, grabbing his helmet, and could hear gunfire raging over the howling in his ears. Shepard spun, hunting for a target that had triggered the ECM burst, but he couldn't see anyone.

Instinct made him look straight up, in time to see half a dozen Replica coming straight down the wall from overhead, light flaring from backpacks. Their armor was different from the previous troops' consisting of dark browns and grays, with larger optical systems in their helmets. Two of the Replica had glowing omnitools on their left hands and carried Tempests; the rest had Avenger rifles.

"Overhead!" Shepard yelled, and slowed. His rifle snapped up, and he fired two long bursts at one of the Replica tech-specialists. The clone's shields flared and collapsed, and the second burst tore through its armor, launched blood into the air, and sent it into an out of control tumble. He shifted aim to the second Replica tech, and put another burst into its shields. A burst from another direction, from one of the Marines apparently, took it in the chest and torso.

Shepard reverted to normal speed just as Liara's biotics flared and impacted one of the Replica air-assault troops from below. The mass effect field launched it straight up into an uncontrolled, spinning flight over the top of the spaceport wall. Another's head simply blew apart in an explosion of ceramic, optics, and brain, courtesy of Garrus.

The last two Replica hit the asphalt outside the gate, on the opposite side of the parked vehicles, and dropped into cover. Shepard saw other contact icons popping onto his radar from overhead, and spotted more of the Replica air-assault troops coming over the top of the blast wall.

_They could have just shot us from the top of the wall, _he thought._ Why are they descending and attacking us in close quarters? _The only reason he could immediately think of was trying to keep his team from simply running into the hatch once it was opened.

"Liara, get that hatch open!" Shepard ordered. Outside the fence, Ashley and Maness were firing up at the descending troops while Garrus and Dilbague engaged the pair who had landed. Shepard sighted another descending enemy Replica and slowed once more, shooting the close down, and then saw something else coming over the top of the wall, and the Replica's tactics made a lot more sense.

There were two of them, enormous, human-shaped forms two meters tall and massing more than a krogan. They were clad in heavy brown and gray armor plating, thicker than even the heaviest conventional plating a human could wear, with a rounded helmet festooned with multiple large optical and scanner arrays. Large, rectangular plates were mounted on their shoulders, like medieval shields, and they carried long, heavy, three-barreled machineguns that vaguely resembled the newer Revenant rifles. The hulking shapes wore massive backpacks which flared as they descended.

"Heavies!" Shepard warned, slowing again and targeting one of the massive Replica soldiers. His weapon roared, sending long, ten-round bursts into the Heavy's shields, but the rounds flattened against thick shields, and his display showed a startlingly-powerful mass effect barrier surrounding the genetic and cybernetic hulk.

"Marines, carnage, Heavies!" Shepard ordered, collapsing his assault rifle and dragging his shotgun out. Another dead Relica soldier slammed into the ground next to him with a wet rattle. Ashley and Maness complied, pulling out their own shotguns, and they charged their shotguns' underbarrel launchers. At almost the same moment, the three of them fired at once, and searing red bolts erupted from the shotguns and slammed into the targeted Replica. The charged high-explosive rounds hammered the Heavy's barriers, the first shot battering them down, the second collapsing them, and the third hitting the Heavy in the chest and launch it backward to slam into the blast wall.

The roar of boosters filled Shepard's ears, and he spun, _slowing _everything once more. A Replica air-assault trooper had landed in a crouch right next to him, barely two meters away, and its rifle was tracking up as it stood. Shepard leapt up as he spun, and his left leg lanced up. His boot hit the Replica in the neck to hard that the head snapped at a perpendicular angle to the rest of its body, and the clone was sent slamming into the nearby fence hard enough to dent the metal.

Shepard reverted to normal, spun back around, and his shields flared. A second Replica had hit the dirt behind him, firing a submachinegun at almost point-blank range into his side. Shepard _slowed _once more, sidestepping out of the Replica's line of fire, and shot forward with another flaring, mass-effect shielded punch into the clone's chest. The air-assault trooper was hurled brutally against the fence and fell in a boneless heap to the asphalt.

The ground shook outside the gate, and Shepard spun again to see the second Heavy had landed, and the ground was littered with dead Replica. At least three more of the air-assault troops had landed among the chaos of the street battle. He spotted Ashley blowing one clone's head off its shoulders with her shotgun, and Dilbague trading fire with two more. Garrus' rifle _thoomed_, and a nearly bisected clone's body tumbled to a splattering crash on the pavement. More were landing around the Heavy, opposite the side where the vehicles were parked, and were using the massive Replica's shields as cover.

"Unlocked!" Liara shouted. As the hatch opened, she whirled toward the chaotic gunbattle.

A massive surge of dark energy erupted around the asari, powerful enough to shake Shepard's teeth, and when she thrust her hands at the cluster of Replica around the Heavy, her biotic power crashed over them like a breaking ocean wave. The half-dozen air-assault troops were lifted off their feet and cast backwards like being slapped by a massive, annoyed god, and flew more than a dozen meters down the street. The Heavy stumbled backwards and toppled off its feet, rolling in the torrent of savage force.

The biotic blast was massive, powerful, and it sent Liara to her knees, her whole body shaking at the sudden exertion. She didn't use blasts like that normally, because they could leave her dangerously vulnerable.

"Now! Everyone to the hatch!" Shepard called, and stepped back toward the gate to shield Liara, firing at another Replica that landed a few meters away. He punched rounds through its shield and backpack, and as blood erupted from its torso plates, the boosters malfunctioned and sent it skipping across the street. But despite Liara's devastating biotic throw, there were still more Replica in the street, and additional clones descending every second. There must have been an entire air-assault platoon coming after them, and a glance overhead showed _another_ Heavy descending. The second Heavy was starting to clamber to its feet, plates scraping and squealing as it fought to regain its center of balance. Ashley and Maness had managed to cross the street to where Garrus and Dilbague were still firing, having dealt with the pair of clones that had landed close to them. The air was shaking with the deafening reports of a dozen assault weapons raging back and forth and the shouts of the Replica troops and Shepard's team as they coordinated movement and fire.

"Pinned down, Shepard!" Ashley called over the radio, her words partially downed out by gunfire. Shepard could see tracers hammering their position by the vehicles, and knew that they would get cut down if they tried to reach the gate.

"Garrus," Shepard called. "Can you hack those vehicles?"

"Easy enough," the turian replied. "The plan?"

Another Replica tried to enter the gate. Shepard blasted it off its feet.

"Withdraw," Shepard ordered. "Find another way in. We can't get to you and you can't reach us."

"Understood," Garrus said, his voice low. "Standby." A couple of seconds later the ground shuddered, and one of the utility trucks rose off the ground. "Simple enough. Everyone, on board!"

Liara had risen to her feet again and was firing her submachinegun through the fence at another Replica trooper, and Shepard finished it off. Her hands rose and another biotic blast launched two more of the enemy across the street. Shepard waved a hand for her to go into the hatch, and she nodded. He slid in behind her as she started into the doorway, and he spotted the rest of the team clambering into the truck. Two of the Replica were charging forward, and he saw one drawing a grenade.

"Frag the vehicle!" one of them shouted in its filtered voice.

Shepard grit his teeth, _slowed_, then rushed _out_ of the gate. He knew that outside, everyone was seeing a blurring form racing out from behind cover, and he could hear low, drawn-out shouts of warning as he leapt through the open gate, shotgun raised. The Replica holding the grenade turned toward him, helmet moving with a slowness that would have been comical if the clone hadn't been trying to kill his companions. Shepard guessed they were less than three meters away when he pulled the trigger.

The aspiring grenadier took the blast in the upper chest and throat, and the clone's shields collapsed almost instantly. The second blast tore its head off and sent the corpse tumbling sideways. Shepard whirled on the other Replica, took a step forward, and shoved his shotgun inside its shield before pulling the trigger.

The shredder slugs bisected the clone from the middle of its chest. Shepard sidestepped as the body flew apart, blood flying everywhere, but it still splattered on the front of his armor. He heard the howl of agony from the clone as it died, the Replica's agonized death-cry distorted and inhuman.

His head screamed in agony, and black spots started to appear in his vision. Shepard reverted and dove back into the gate, while the utility truck leapt up and drove away. Rounds flew past as the rest of the team fired out the rear bed and passenger compartment, and more bullets slammed into his shields or skipped off the fencing around him. His legs started to wobble as he threw himself across the asphalt to the waiting hatch. A bright blue flare rippled past him, and he heard a Replica scream as it was launched away, and then hands grabbed him by the arm.

He blinked through the agony in his head, and found himself stumbling into a dim hallway of industrial gray ceramic. Gunfire blazed behind him, but as he spun around, he heard a door hiss closed. Liara crouched by the door for a couple of seconds, working with her omnitool, and the indicator light over the door's panel turned to an angry red.

"There, that should hold," she said, rising and stepping over to where he was sitting.

Shepard blinked again. When had he sat down? His head was swimming with the ghosts of euphoria and a deluge of dizziness. Psi-high, once more. Liara's omnitool glowed over him as she scanned quickly, her dark lips pressed in a thin line behind her visor.

"No injuries," she said after a moment. "Thank the Goddess. When I saw that blood . . . ."

"You should see the other guy," Shepard grunted, and started to rise as the aftereffects of overtaxing his brain wore off. That was the one blessing of psi-high; just as fast as the symptoms set in, they wore off. Unless you were going crazy.

Shepard steadied himself, shaking his head to make sure that the dizziness was gone, and then nodded to Liara. He activated his radio as he looked down the passage, and signaled to Liara to switch to low-light.

"Garrus?" he called. "Ash?"

"Here, Shepard," Garrus replied. "We've managed to disengage. Looking for alternate route into the port."

"Avoid contact if possible," Shepard ordered, and shook his head. Not likely, considering the furball they'd just waged. The Replica would be all over them now that they knew that Shepard's team had at least attempted ingress through the maintenance accessways. Precisely how they located them was uncertain, but what mattered now was that the Replica knew they were in the underground access passages. They had to move fast to evade being pinned down.

"We're going to continue inside," Shepard continued. "See if we can find Fettel."

"Understood," Garrus replied. "Once we get inside we'll link up."

Shepard nodded he started down the corridor. Garrus' confidence was a good sign; he'd come a long way from the turian who was uncertain at what direction he was going to take. He would make a good Spectre, once he was finished with Shepard's crew.

He took the lead down the passage, Liara behind him, and they advanced into the darkness.

* * *

><p><em>"Echo Seven-One to Command, contacts on long-range sensors. Sensor return does not match Alliance, Citadel, or Terminus."<em>

They crawled below, sliding within their structures, their lives meaningless, directionless, purposeless. The only ones of note were connected by threads of pulsing dark energy to one, a sign of true purpose, of focused willpower. Of non-biochemical evolution, of directed advancement to a higher purpose. Thousands of them, united in a single direction.

But even then, an accident.

_"This is Command, we see it. Stand by."_

The pulses below, the shifting beacon of dark energy emerging from a central point, drew the attention of the extension and its subordinate limbs. It drew it down; were the extension a lesser awareness, it would be like bait. But this was . . . An objective. Yes. A goal to be achieved, an asset to be collected, dissected, analyzed, and purposed toward a greater end.

_"Charlie Three-Five to Command, picking up airborne disturbance. Large mass effect field descending through upper atmosphere."_

The lesser extensions of the central beacon turned their blind eyes upwards, taking warning. Their feeble arms were raised in alert. Their limited, finite consciousnesses, slaved to the central will (itself an extension of a far greater) became aware as the vessel descended and the limbs gathered. Their wings flickered, the animal sense of self lurking in their efficient, simple minds readying for combat.

_"This is Command. Heavy weapons go to alert status. Possible hostile vessel entering perimeter. Stand by to engage."_

Pulses of weak energy. Sensor scans. Limbs reaching for armor and cover. Primitive sounds exchanging, sophisticated pulses of thought through dark energy corridors transferring higher-level information.

The central beacon sent a short, decisive pulse, and the limbs connected to it answered. The identical, purposed lifeforms brought weapons to the ready and oriented toward the arrival.

_"Command to all units, vessel does not match known iterations. Assume hostile. Engage at will."_

Then there was another pulse. A different one, but recorded. Observed. Familiar. A priority. A form that had earned recognition.

_Shepard_.

Confirmation screamed down a thousand brains and through a hundred kilometers of zero-mass corridors. Every limb and extension awoke to the observed threat. Covers opened, weapons were raised, and the limbs leapt out, focused on their confirmed goal.

_"Command to all units, hostile alien lifeforms landing inside the city. Unknown technology. Engage with caution."_

Weapons were charged and released. The arms of the limbs screamed and hissed, dark energy shifting around each limb to deflect incoming strikes. Primitive mass accelerators dominated the enemy arms; basic armor and equipment compared with overall tech level. Disposable. Purposeful. Efficient.

Conflict was joined.

Phantom signals slid back up the corridors to the extension: echoes of pain and suffering, filtered into meaninglessness. Limbs collapsed and died, irrelevant. They were replaceable.

Other limbs, swarms of even emptier minds than the primary bipedal limbs. They emerged and then screamed. Dark energy surging through the site interfered with them; thousands of individual, miniscule limbs collapsed, overloaded or confused. The extension quickly withdrew them, annoyance flickering through its tendrils. The pulses from the beacon rendered the seeking clouds of tiny limbs ineffective. A potent weapon rendered impotent by the accident of biology.

Perhaps a reflection of the conflict in general.

_"Bioform profile scanning. Data aquired, compared to known species. All units, be advised, alien life forms consistent with profiles acquired from Collectors. Uploading combat data to squad leaders for tactical adjustment."_

The enemy's limbs changed their orientation and behavior, aware of what they were facing. The extension focused on the battlefield more closely, and found where conflict was most ferocious. Feedback rolled through the extension, and data was fed both above and below.

_"Command, Echo Three-Six, be advised, hostile forces deploying significant personnel outside the spaceport. Requesting support. Perimeter units cannot contain enemy incursion."_

The limbs, alone, would not be sufficient, at least not swiftly enough. The extension reached down, found one limb, and peered through its eyes. Machinery triggered, dark energy flared, and the connection was established.

"**I AM ASSUMING DIRECT CONTROL."**

_"What the fuck is that?"_

_"Quiet down! Command, Echo Three-Six, one of the Collectors is changing. Possible biotic threat present. Support request-"_

Feedback ran up the radio, chased by an agonized scream.

"**I AM ETERNAL. YOU ARE INSECTS."**

_"Command, hostile entity is using incend-"_

"**YOU CANNOT STOP ME."**

_"He wiped out the whole squad!"_

"**SHEPARD WILL NOT ESCAPE ME. YOU ARE BUT DUST."**

The limb broke down, but its purpose was fulfilled, and countless more poured through the gap that had been forced in the organic defenses.

And the pulses grew faster. More erratic. More discernable.

* * *

><p>The Replica responded to the sudden invasion with characteristic ruthlessness. Individual emotional responses of fear and anger were sublimated. Outlying perimeter units like the ones that had been engaging Shepard's squad moved to intercept the invaders as they bounded over the rooftops; the alien troops numbered in the hundreds, while the remaining clone troops were but a few dozen strong. They had no hope of winning, but that wasn't the point. The Replica slowed the invaders down, holding them back for the precious couple of minutes needed for a thousand fearless soldiers to be reoriented toward the incursion.<p>

Paxton Fettel directed his commanders personally. Their decision-making processes were overridden and he took control of the command units directly. It was a painful mental chore to seize absolute control like this, but with the sudden arrival of the intruders, he needed to direct this battle personally. At the same time, he spared a small part of his awareness to jump from one mind to another as his perimeter sentries were overwhelmed, giving him a better look at the intruders. VI-supplied confirmation of EM profiles and biological structure were nothing compared to a firsthand look at the enemy. These . . . _Collectors_.

He saw creatures the size of humans, clad in gray-brown armor of chitinous plates - or maybe that was their skin? He couldn't tell. He saw other details: elongated heads, a quartet of glowing yellow eyes paired horizontally along the sides of their heads, and spindly arms and legs tipped with claws. They were oddly identical; he saw no variation in height, weight, or even the shapes of their armor or weapons. The only differences between individuals were the intensity and shapes of the mass effect fields surrounding them, red-shifting their appearances slightly.

"How curious," Fettel murmured to himself as he maneuvered his troops to face the threat, while commanding his engineers to focus their efforts. One freighter as nearly finished, and he ordered the engineers to ignore the other. He suspected that few enough of his Replica would survive the coming clash of what appeared to be two armies of cloned soldiers.

He moved quickly between sets of eyes, analyzing his enemy. The Collectors had deployed a substantial force of infantry, but he saw no vehicles. No aircraft, no hovercraft, nothing to support their ground troops. Long-range recon was returning images of swarms of tiny insect-like objects flying around the towering, organic shape of their warship hovering over the city, but they did not descend for some reason he couldn't fathom.

A signal flashed back up the chain of command, and he caught it from the command unit that received it. Fettel narrowed his eyes and concentrated, tracing the signal back to the Replica that had sent it, and peered through that clone's eyes and listened through its ears.

One of the Collectors had . . . Changed. glowing cracks had formed within its armor, like shining lava breaking through broken rock. EM detectors showed a thermal bloom surrounding the body, and element zero scanners showed a mass effect field of stunning power around the Collector.

It spoke, a voice deep and powerful, but edged with contempt.

He didn't hear the words it spoke, for the moment the voice flashed back into his mind, Fettel's knees gave out, and a white-hot fury screamed through his mind and body, so intense it sent spikes of pain through his limbs and chest. Part of him was distantly aware that the hate he suddenly felt was alien, but the rest of him was consumed by the inexplicable rage the voice had caused, and he screamed.

The roar that escaped his lips was not merely audible. The Replica commanders in front of him started twitching in their chairs, one convulsing so hard it fell to the floor. The guards surrounding the room started screaming as well, shaking and twitching where they stood. Their weapons, linked to their armors' biometrics, locked up and did not fire even as the triggers were reflexively pulled over and over.

Writhing in pain and seething with alien hate, Paxton Fettel managed a single coherent thought, and the Replica suffering under his own telepathic agony responded immediately.

_Kill them. Kill them all._

* * *

><p>Pain lanced through Shepard as he reached the intersection in the maintenance passage, and he stumbled again. He tried grabbing his head as agony beat against him, but his fingers met only his helmet. He thought he heard someone shouting his name, and a sudden numbness swept through his skin - <em>painkillers, meaning medigel dispenser<em> - but it did nothing to deaden the agony in his brain.

Worse still, it was familiar. It was-

_Mindoir_

-but stronger, more intense. More . . . Aware.

He pushed back against the pain, fighting back a scream, and his back hit a wall. Liara was in front of him, omnitool glowing, fear and worry etched across her features. He stared at her eyes for a few seconds, gritting his teeth, and-

Something moved behind her, visible on his scopes.

He blinked, focusing through the pain, and ignored Liara's worried questions. He stared past her, trying to make out the shape, and saw . . .

A young girl, with dark hair, a red dress, and feet and fingertips crusted with dried blood, walking down the hallway toward them.

Blackness yawned behind her, a void swirling and twisting, tendrils sliding in and out, dark energy writhing like a living thing. Eyes gleamed with a gold-red light, focusing on _him_, specifically.

"Shepard?" Liara asked, and finally seemed to notice he was looking past her. She started to turn, and her motion broke the spell.

The tendrils leapt out, reaching toward them and accompanied by a scream that shook his body and mind, and he saw flames erupting from the appendages.

Shepard did the first thing that came to mind, and the world _slowed_. He leapt forward, shoving Liara back, and raised his assault rifle. He leveled it at the nearest tendril and opened fire, the weapon's muzzle strobing with energy release at a stately pace. The rounds punched through the fire and the shadow, and went right through it without stopping, but the tendril began to retract as if in pain. He shifted his fire to drive back the next one, and then the next, and each shadowy appendage retreated as he shot it.

He drove them back, then turned his hyper-fast eyes toward the little girl. Her face was pale, almost corpse-white, and was blank, while her gold-red eyes _ -familiar dream eyes-_ stared at him with what might have been curiosity or apathy.

Instinct and a decade working with FEAR told him all he needed to know. He knew out-of-control psychic phenomena when he saw it, and knew the quickest way to solve it. Shepard leveled the rifle at the little girl's chest and pulled the trigger.

The room flattened. The ceramic walls cracked, metallic machinery was pounded flat, and the dim lights exploded. Shepard found himself weightless for a heartbeat, and realized he was airborne, apparently flung backward, and his ears were ringing from what felt like a bitch of a loud scream.

He hit the ground with a scrape of armor on ceramic floor, and rolled down the corridor. He came to a halt against the wall. Liara lay nearby, and in a moment of panic he checked her biometrics. Her hardsuit returned that she was alive, but unconscious due to unknown head trauma. He triggered an emergency medigel application while his head was still swimming, and fumbled for a weapon. His sidearm unfolded in his hand, and Shepard raised it, looking around for-

She stood next to him, staring down at his prone body, so close that black hair brushed the top of his helmet. Those glowing eyes bored down into his mind, and he thought he saw something different in her expression. Sadness, maybe?

One of her blood-crusted hands reached down toward his helmet as he swung the pistol around, and the finger went _through_ it as if it wasn't there. They touched his forehead, and there was a sudden flare of heat along his skin and within his skull, then-

Darkness.

* * *

><p>The display beeped again, and he took one quick drag before reaching up and touching the flashing key.<p>

"Report," the Illusive Man asked.

"Massive telesthetic spike on Naxos, sir. We're tracing it now. I can narrow it down to a cluster, maybe a single system if it lasts long enough." A pause. "Got it! Sending it now!"

"Good work," the Illusive Man said, managing a small, satisfied smile.

"Sir, Collectors are confirmed on the planet. We've also lost track of Shepard's team."

"You've done your job," he replied. "Get out of there. Don't concern yourself with Shepard or Fettel. We have the real prize now."

"Understood, sir."

As the line cut, he spun around in his chair to another display and began sending orders to the retrieval force. If they were fast and lucky, they could hit the target before they moved it to another system. And if they recovered the target . . . .

His fingers slowed. If they recovered it, they would be playing with a force more dangerous than anything else in the galaxy. He'd seen what happened to Sovereign. But more importantly, if they recovered Armacham's dark little secret, it might backfire on them if she sensed him. He put nothing past something that powerful.

But they had to take that risk. That was what Cerberus specialized in, after all. Taking one monster and turning it and its power against another.

He finished sending the order, and settled back in his chair. He looked upon the dying star once more, and slid back into thought while pouring another shot. Everything was in motion now, and all he had to do was wait and ponder.

That was the worst part of it all.

* * *

><p><em><strong>Codex - Organizations - Armacham Technology Corporation<strong>_

_Founded in 2114, Armacham Technology Corporation (ATC) is currently the single largest military-industrial firm in human space, and one of the top ten largest corporations in the galaxy. Originally founded simply as an aerospace and weapons company, Armacham's meteoric rise was jump-started 2120 when it managed to secure a no-bid contract to supply the United North American States with next-generation small arms. From there, additional contracts were established the UNAS and other countries. Armacham swiftly expanded their product base, branching out into other fields, both high and low tech. ATC eventually secured contracts in advanced spaceflight and colonization in 2135, and an ATC survey team uncovered the Prothean ruins on Mars in 2137._

_Armacham spearheaded research into element zero and mass effect technology, and developed the first faster-than-light drive based on mass effect fields. ATC survey units discovered the Charon mass relay and charted a large number of star systems beyond Arcturus, and secured contracts to supply the newly developed Human Systems Alliance with everything from small arms and spaceship weaponry to toothpaste and MREs. When the First Contact War erupted in 2149, ATC deployed first-generation Replica units to defend the colony; the exceptional performance of the Replica and other ATC-engineered weaponry during the conflict drew galactic attention. Once relations between the Systems Alliance and the Citadel were formalized, Armacham began receiving contracts from planetary and species-wide governments._

_Armacham is currently an industry leader in fields such as small arms, aerospace weapons and engines, robotics, genetic engineering, and psychic-shielding technology. In recent years the corporation has received bad press due to allegations of unethical bioengineering, legally-questionable psychic research, and their extensive private military wing. Due to Armacham's extensive contracts across Citadel space and contacts with many governments, the corporation retains immense political capital, and has weathered legal trouble, criminal inquiries, and even Spectre investigations. _

_The corporation also maintains a substantial private military force that operates primarily in the Terminus Systems, although their military forces have also been contracted out to Citadel and planetary governments. Conservative estimates place ATC's active military strength at between twenty to fifty thousand mixed-species personnel, although many estimates put actual military strength as much higher, and do not factor in "regular" corporate security. Spectre Jodum Bau has stated in a report to the Council that, "With three extranet calls, ATC can mobilize half a million troops." These numbers can be further augmented by an unspecified number of Replica battalions; STG and Spectre analysis estimate at least forty thousand Replica units in active service, with at least one hundred thousand or more in "storage."_

* * *

><p><em><strong>Author's Notes: Its kind of interesting how writing small-scale, tactical battles can be harder and more complex than large-scale battles. With large-scale battles you can skip elements and gloss over parts of the engagement by switching up perspectives, but with tactical battles where everything is happening close together, describing the environment and everyone's positions and actions becomes a lot more challenging.<strong>  
><em>

_**One of the reasons this chapter took a bit was because I did a lot of behind-the-scenes work on the overall story, as well as putting in work on Renegade and Forward and Tiberium Wars as well. I actually wrote out an entire, fairly-complex timeline and a number of Codex articles that I used to reference for technology, history, and behavior. (this isn't the first time I've done something like this; I had an entire order-of-battle written out for the 4th Battalion, 103rd Recon in TibWars, for example) This was critical to both establishing the story's framework and keeping everything consistent within my own work.**_

_**There's some alternate history elements in this story as well; the actual ME timeline has been massaged a bit thanks to ATC's presence (i.e. a sharp fan will note the First Contact War's date doesn't jive with canon). Another thing to keep in mind is that, considering how much I am changing things, don't take everything for granted; those familiar with either ME or FEAR might be caught off-guard.**_

_**Until next chapter . . . .**_


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